David Crosby Quotes

I'm not the sort of chap who can sit down and write music. When it comes, I'm happy.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.

Every song you write you think is the last one you're going to manage. You put everything you've got into the song, and you've twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

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.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

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

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

When a song wants to be written, it will be written.

Songs do write themselves through you; I know people find it hard to believe, but it's true.

I don't think we ever really think about it when we're doing it, because if you sort of go in with a plan of attack, it tends to take away the natural rhythm of songwriting.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

It's gotta feel natural. I'm always into that, and after awhile, if I am working on a song too long and trying to make something out of it that it's not... it's best just to stop and move on.

When I wrote 'Let Her Go,' it's not like I was doing anything different. I was just writing a song as I would any other day of the year; it just so happened that this one resonated with people.