Rostam Batmanglij Quotes

I get the biggest kick out of it, to hear words that I wrote and chords that I wrote being sung by somebody else.

I don't really write songs. They're just there anyway, chiseling away at the atmosphere, and suddenly they're like, 'Oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for finding me. We'll share each other now.'

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

Writing for somebody else is really fun 'cause I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost.

I've done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I'm onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create, and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.

The creative part for me is making songs, and that's what I really love the most, and that's what I've always done for every band I've ever had.

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.

When we write songs, we don't ever sit down to write an Old Dominion song. We just sit down to write the best song we possibly can.

One of the nice things about songwriting is you can be inspired by absolutely anything.

I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.

You're always thinking about making new music.

I never had this ego where I must write everything. I'm not Bob Dylan.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

If I'm in the studio, I'm completely on music. I try to go to that place and that's the toughest thing for me to do. When I'm with other musicians, sometimes I go back to, almost like, childhood, because that's what I always wanted to be.

Music is still above all else the thing that does it for me.

I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

I just love making music, and I wouldn't want to stop.