Adam Young Quotes

Sometimes touring can warp reality because you're never in one place long enough to get a feel for it. You don't interact with people long enough to know what real life is. That's why a lot of artists write songs about longing and missing people when they're on the road. I do my best to keep my mind open and I read a lot when I'm on tour, so I hope I have good things to write about. I'm constantly in the songwriting process.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.

Right now I feel so inspired, it's hard to believe. I've written about 20 songs in the last two days. I'd gone about four months without writing a thing.

When I write I find a quiet place.

I haven't written an awful lot recently, but I think I probably will start again very shortly. Being so much on the road, when you have a couple of weeks off, you're likely to avoid sitting at the piano, and taping, and giving yourself more work to do.

Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.

I'm most happy when I am writing at night, because I need space and time to write.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

There's something about the air and the sky and the atmosphere in the South of France that must be very conducive to work, to being creative, because I have written several of my books there. I find it so much easier because you're cut off. If you don't want to speak to anybody, basically they don't know where you are. And it's so beautiful.

I try to indulge my muse whenever I am able to get away from it all.

I really like Los Angeles. I like the weather, the openness of it, the beach, the mountains, the desert. I find it inspiring. I get quite a lot of writing done out there.

The problem is to find the time to write. That's why I go to sea. I couldn't be happier than when at sea.

There's nothing quite like a quiet corner in a coffee shop to gather your thoughts and begin writing.

I sleep with a notebook next to me, and most nights I sleep with my guitar next to me.

We have a camp up in the Adirondacks with no electricity, and I find that it's one of the most fertile places for me as far as songwriting because there isn't much to do.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.

Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

I called the guys from Promise of the Real, whom I've been playing with, and they were all on the road. Right after I hung up the phone, I wrote another song and started writing another, and I'm going, "Hey, I can't wait. I should be doing this now!" My experience tells me that when it's there, it's there, and you can't make it wait. So I got Jimmy Keltner and Paul Bushnell, two good guys, and went in and did this record ["Peace Trail"].

People say, "How do you write songs?" I say, "Patience." I may have a track that's hot, but no words. I'll just let it sit for years, because I know they're going to meet. They'll find it.

I always have my best thoughts on the toilet.

Any time I write a new song, I am jazzed about it for like 24 hours and then I am over it and want to write another one.