Jean-Marc Vallee Quotes

To me, it's all about the song. Songs are what make me excited. You hear a great song and you want to record it or get a great idea and you want to write it.

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

Music is an important part of my writing process.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I'd be writing hit songs every minute.

How did I write 'Spin Me?' I listened to Luther Vandross's 'I Wanted Your Love.'

When I'm writing, I'm focusing more on just the basic melody and the lyrics.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

It doesn't take me long to write songs.

My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

I have to have a guitar sitting around. I sing in the shower. I sing around the house. The music comes secondary. The lyrics come first.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it.

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.

I really like the thing I did with Martina McBride. I had that song sitting around for a long time.

I want to be like Bruce Springsteen or something, making songs that are relevant.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.

When I first started making music, it was learning other people's songs and putting them onto four-track. Like Beatles songs and stuff. When I started writing, I used the singing side of the production as a vehicle for melody and lyrical ideas.

I feel like a hit will come whenever it does, but I don't want to sit in a studio trying to figure out the magic formula and mixing spices and trying to come up with the perfect song.

Sometimes it's really quick, and sometimes it's really long. There's no formula for writing songs.

The River,' to me, meant 43 songs.