Jason Molina Quotes

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

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.

Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.

I think the best riffs and the best songs come when you're jamming and having a good time.

One has to draw upon one's own musical thoughts and one's own musical acumen, and not to be afraid to let that come into one's work. Perhaps that comes with more experience, but perhaps it also comes with daring, and believing that you should.

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 wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.

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.

Until you learn to play what you want to hear, you're barking up the wrong tree.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

I love to improvise when it's appropriate and encouraged by a producer.

I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.

There's art in rhythm playing. Just find it. Make your own art. Find your place, and when it's your time to solo, it's your time to shine.

I'm still more comfortable with standards than with my own songs.

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.

If you give me a bass guitar and you ask me to improvise something, or even be with some musicians and follow them, I wouldn't be able to do it. And I want to change that.

The rule is to try and never play the same thing twice when you have the freedom to do that in the song.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

I think I have the capability to make music different from what I have already released. There are ghazals and other songs that I can create. There is no stopping me though.

All of my solos were improvised initially - I would go in and get my bearings and see what I came up with.