Lenny Kravitz Quotes

It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.

Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

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 you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

I play as I feel.

I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.

When I start writing, I'll have a vague concept or I'll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.

I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is.

My formula is not thinking about what I'm doing; it's about still having fun and making music. I don't go into the studio with a thought pattern or certain goals in mind - sometimes I'll start with drums, other times I'll start with the piano - but it's all done spontaneously, so nothing is premeditated, and nothing takes a long time.

I still maintain the fact that when I write songs, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't think about it pragmatically. I say what's in my brain, and sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's terrible.

I never have a clear goal or a theme when it comes to writing an album.

When I go into a room to write, it's like I'm not trying to say, 'I need to write a song that sounds like Eric Church or Jason Aldean.' I just try to get the best song that's in the room that day. Whatever style or sound that may be, I'm not afraid to attack it at that angle.

Sometimes when I'm writing lyrics, it's a very loose train of thought, and wherever that takes me, I let it flow.

The way it always starts with me making my music is I will never, ever start with the production first. It's always me at the piano, fresh on the day. I never come with anything prepared.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

All I'm trying to do is simply play guitar and elicit this creativity from the instrument.

I think that some of the best Crowes stuff we did had that spontaneous vibe. Thats something thats always interested me in music. Im not really the kind of person to get too bogged down in the details. I think that takes away from the emotion and the vibe of what youre doing.

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .