Miles Davis Quotes

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

Every time I try to write a song, when I sit down and think I'm going to write, I really want to write a song, and it never works out. It's always when it hits me unexpectedly on a plane or right before I go to bed, something like that.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I learned my phrasing from Frank. I loved him so much.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

Whenever I meet someone who's talented, I always want to write something for them!

You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself. Obviously, there's something going on here. And whether you want to call it channeling or being connected to a creative force or knowing your history and knowing where you belong, that's, you know, maybe a personal thing.

I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.

Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.

If you write songs long enough, you run out of material that's original to yourself.

But the classic Tenacious D songwriting is Jack or myself will have an idea - I might have a riff - and we'll improv. And once Jack's feeling it, we turn on the tape recorder and start jamming, improv on that riff, improv on those lyrics, and then go back and see if there's anything good in there.

Music is like having a conversation. All musicians inspire each other, and they're all geared to play something that matters.

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

I'm often just writing just to write. I'm not writing with...If I write, like, sitting down with a goal in mind, it's always, like, the worst. It turns into a ska song even if I'm trying to write like a horror movie sound track or something.

I built a global brand Mugler, and we did things that inspired so many people. I'm proud to have helped some amazing people express themselves in new ways. What I appreciate most in the world is to have met and befriended incredible geniuses, like David Bowie and Cyd Charisse and Celia Cruz, who was the goddess of salsa. I saw people kneeling on the streets for her. Which they did for me in Japan. That was really embarrassing.

If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

People say, "You should write lyrics" and I say I'm quite happy not to, because I like being part of that process where you write your version of what someone else's lyrics are saying to you, and that enjoyment has never changed.

I smoked this joint and then it hit me. I thought, what you gotta do is play your own simply blues.

If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into.

I'm not one of these people who sits down and writes to say I'm gonna write a song about this or that, or a specific subject. The songs actually kind of write themselves.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't. And clearly the ones who wrote music were more superior human beings in his mind. So he kind of nudged me and sort of prodded me into it. I picked it up slowly. Then I learned more about chords and harmony and I just kept adding to that. One of the great things about having good players in your band is that you just ask them questions. You can pick up some good information that way.