Neneh Cherry Quotes

Some of my best songwriting choices started as mistakes or learning curves, when I accidentally hit a 'wrong' key or something. I try not to lose that the more I learn the how's and why's of piano.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

It's cool to have instruments lying around because they give you different ideas.

Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything.

I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

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.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

Music is chaos. When I write songs, I'm opening the door to madness.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I have fallen back in love with music, which has allowed me to get back to my roots and create sounds without borders.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited. That gives me energy to want to make new things, and it forces me to hear things in new ways, which then can only help to say things in a new way.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

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!

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

It's a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that's a good thing.

I go into the whole composer thing quite open to keep on going and keep on trying different things because you never know... the next idea you have might be the one.

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

I'm not trying to become a pop artist, and I'm not trying to make sure I stay a country artist. I'm just trying to make sure I make the best music I can, according to my way.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

Dylan doesn't have to make Blonde On Blonde every time.

I try to do things that keep me interested. And play music that moves me. I like to move around and play in a lot of different ways.

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.