Beck Quotes

I just write songs whenever I feel like it, whenever they come to me.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

Most of the time, particularly with this record, 'The Light of the Sun,' I really just been standing in front of a microphone and blacking out musically, you know. I'd come back a couple hours later and there's six songs from beginning to end, you know? I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know how I'm going to say it.

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

It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.

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

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

Sometimes I play something, and I haven't recorded it, and I don't know where it came from, why my hands did what they did, what key it was in, anything.

If I get in the studio, it's very organic. I like to go off how I feel.

I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

When improvisation is properly applied, it is compositional thinking, sped way up.

Sometimes song happens all at once where you sit down and the lyrics and the music just come out. So there definitely isn't one way that it happens - there are a lot of different things that take place.

How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

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.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

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 write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

I don't think about the styles. I write whatever comes out and I use whatever kind of instrumentation works for those songs.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

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.