Sam Hunt Quotes

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.

I can't sing, but I'll sing over this chord progression, like, over and over, for however long it takes - sometimes it's, like, two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes - until I've found like a hook or something that I'm really happy with. And then, basically, it just like that's my melody, and that's where I start from.

I kind of like polishing the songs that I'm working on. I'm really working hard on some specific songs.

I've held onto little musical sketches that I thought could be useful, and the more time that I spend doing them for each film, then the more I have to draw on.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

R. Kelly is different - music is always going through his brain. I remember we'd be having a conversation, and he'd choose a word I said and write a whole song to it.

Amaal and I have some sort of magnetic connection. I am my brother's first assistant. So I have sung the scratch versions of all his songs. We make music at home, jam every day.

Part of my growth as a producer was not just about making beats but also helping in the process of inspiring the song and making the song the center.

When I wrote 'Paradise,' it was going to be an interlude - like a segue from the song before. Then I just added more to it because everyone loved it.

There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.

I think there’s no greater joy than completing a song out of thin air. It’s like inventing something, but it’s invisible, you know? It’s weird. It amazes me. You can send it out in the world, and that’s the joy. It’s like giving birth to all these songs and letting them go like they’re your kids.

I find it extremely difficult talking about my songs because there's so many different things that can make a song come together.

I've been writing music since I was about eight. I would write sporadically. I wrote a lot of music in high school. I guess the oldest song on the record ("I Thought I Saw Your Face") is about eight years old. It's the old "I had my whole life to write my first album and six months to write the second one." I did, to some degree, but actually, a lot of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote really recently. So it varies.

If you don't have an album or you don't have any tune, you can't start.

Sometimes I start with a great title or idea, sometimes a great melody will run through my mind; but the higher percentage of the time, the words and music pretty much come at the same time.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

I wrote, in total, about 50 or so songs (finished and unfinished) in the 2 and a half years leading up until this moment, and trying to decide what songs to include on the Mini-Album was super difficult, because there were so many different sound/mood roads I could have gone down. But, after going through everything, these tracks seemed to fit together and communicate a similar sentiment and mood the best.

I love to play music, and this is fun, and let's record this stuff in a way that we both like. That was exciting enough, so we just recorded it. There was no business in it until the very last minute, really. It was really as much of an extension of me writing the songs in my bedroom as it could possibly be.

Sometimes I catch myself doing something that I've already done. The more I've done, the more that's likely to happen. Then I just throw it away. I wait until I've got the right way of getting a thing done, which means my songwriting proceeds at a very slow pace. But it's the only way I can really work.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

It's a really big struggle for me to write a song. Songs take either 30 seconds for me to write or a year or two to piece together, depending on the song and how I'm feeling on any given day. I don't really like to write music at all unless I am completely unbothered by touring.

Normally what I do is I'll record something that I really like which will be part of a song or an idea. I kind of just record things and then I'm done with them. It takes discipline to actually carve out a song.

All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.