Adam Granduciel Quotes

I write a melody and then change it and change it until I get it the way I like it.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.

You kinda don't know what's going to make a good song. You've got to shoot around in the dark for a little while.

Sometimes you write songs that don't all fit together. What do you, just throw them away? This might be a chance for growth and learning. It could be a horrible fall-on-your-face kind of experiment.

I will play around with an idea for a very long time until it's found it's feet and it's good enough to become a song.

I'm not the type of person who makes a lot of songs in a day just to see which one is the best.

My initial ideas are just a starting place. As a record goes along, it becomes more about making discoveries and getting excited about new songs.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

Before you worry about what genre it is, about whether it's a loop or a drum, it's about what suits the song. It's using what's within your reach, but also reaching for everything you can. I don't know if I always get it right, because I don't know every sound yet.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

I think a lot of what you do in acting, and for the most part singing and dancing and everything, is trial and error. It's all about just seeing what works, and if it does, to use it, and if not, to throw it away.

When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

I'm one of those actors who likes to do it wrong nine ways before I come to the tenth way, which is the way I think it should be.

Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.

In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it's trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people.

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.