Paul Taylor Quotes

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.

Ever since I picked up a bass, I've written songs.

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

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

I compose melodies in my head and then interpret them musically with my guitar and keep them recorded. The guitar helps me to build unique chord structures on simple melodies.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I sit down and create atmospheres, start playing guitar or piano and just sing whatever comes out of my mouth.

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.

I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of 'Prisoner In Disguise' when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

As a songwriter, you might write every day and throughout the course of a year you might get four songs that are really special.

Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word.

As a musician, I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. I'm a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.

There's no magic for getting into the groove... just banging away at it. Sometimes the lyrics come first, sometimes the music.

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

I've written lots of songs on the piano. My mother had a piano and it was the first instrument I played.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

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 I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I'm just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I'll have a song in an hour.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.