Spike Jonze Quotes

For 'Regulate,' I was at home, and I came up with it. I was listening to Michael McDonald's 'I Keep Forgettin'.' It was a record that I always loved, from being a kid and my parents playing it when they had their company of friends over. It was a record that just stuck in my head, and it just felt good.

I always start with the music and then try to figure out what I want to write about lyrically.

We wrote the songs we wrote - we took from our own experiences, melded it together, and wrote what became 'Appetite For Destruction.'

Sometimes I'll write a song first and then I'm like, "Oh this person will be great on this song." But there are some artists I know what want, like off the top I knew I wanted Brandy and Faith Evans. Their music is like the soundtrack to my life, so it was a personal thing for me. So once they said yes, I wrote songs specifically for them.

I'm a professional songwriter - personal attitudes have nothing to do with writing a song.

The band Grizzly Bear, I think they're excellent. There's a beauty and a musicality there that I wish would have been in vogue in the late '80s, when I was forming bands.

When I was recording my first solo album 'Imaginaryland,' I was listening to a lot of movie scores.

My father used to tape 'Top of the Pops' for me every Sunday, and I would sit in my bedroom, write down the lyrics of all of my favourite songs, and sing along. I was always singing in my bedroom with a hairbrush.

It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

It's funny, because music is one of those things it is natural to go into. You hear it so much growing up, it kind of permeates you and eventually you spew out some music of your own.

When I'm actually creating music, I try not to listen to the hip-hop records that are going on, because I think, subconsciously, we steal from each other.

I don't know, when I was a kid, when I would see shows that changed my life, I would go to see shows where there was my mother taking us to see classic rock concerts, like Zeppelin, or when I saw Pink Floyd or when I saw, you know, when I was a little older, and I saw Nine Inch Nails, and I saw The Cure.

When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.

There are some seminal things that happened in the '70s for me: Billy Joel and Jackson 5.

I still love 'The Cure' more than almost any other band. But they were really, truly like the first band that I really loved and felt was mine, you know. At a pivotal time in my life when I was 13, 14 years old.

My first albums as a little kid were Elton John's 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,' Simon and Garfunkel's 'Greatest Hits' - and 'Workingman's Dead.' How many other people still listen to the music they liked at age 12?

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

When After Forever stopped, I didn't want to first find a band, then see if I could write with them, figure that whole thing out, then record an album. Instead, I worked with people I knew would be good songwriters out of an idea how I thought it would sound like.

I was 5 years old when I first broke into my mother's records and played Nat King Cole, and sat alongside the stereo and listened to Nat's music.

I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.

I grew up with Ray Charles playing in the car all the time or playing in the house.

'Nova' was one of the tracks that inspired me to create 'Fade,' which later became 'Faded'. It has a beautiful melody, and the way it progresses throughout the whole track is just amazing!

I think we all love the music we listened to as kids the most.