Anthony Braxton Quotes

For the longest time I was brought up listening to only two genres of music, pop and rock. So in the past few years I've been trying to expand my interests because I think that you can only write to the extent of your knowledge, and if your knowledge is limited you can't write past that.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.

We became the songs we wrote.

The main thing is that I've been studying composition for the last four years. I'd say it's the life experience combined with the lessons that enabled me to go much further.

It's so fun to make up stories, but I find that the songs that I'm most proud of came from a real thing in my life - 'Peter Pan' being one of those.

I still have a lot to learn. I'm concentrating on learning a lot more about music.

Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.

I think being part of Pentatonix has helped my arrangement style a lot, and that's helped me expand myself.

I'm just trying to work out how to write music now, because I've never had the opportunity where my number-one priority is writing music. I don't know how my brain works yet.

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.

I wrote my first song when I was about eight. It was about putting a diaper on a chicken!

As a person and as a singer, I love to try something new. I like challenges.

I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.

I was a history major, but that was because it took the fewest requirements of any major. In my sophomore year, I started getting back into making movies. My senior year, I took playwriting classes, and I feel like that's where I learned to be a writer.

I've been writing songs since my teens.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

The thing that's carried over from my visual-art education into what I do musically is my openness.

I might sound like the weird artist hippy girl or whatever, but I don't have a complaint about what jazz is or what I'm doing with music. And that's more of a philosophy on my life. I could find things that maybe could shift or change, but ultimately, it's like that's not a good way to live our lives and think about what we do.