Mabel Quotes

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

But I could not imagine having a child and the child not having a relationship with music that opens up their mind and their imagination and teaches them things.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.

It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

I couldn't find a way to write music with numbers and rules and schedules. So I tried to forget the academic idea of music and started to see if it was possible to do creative work, taking in all the influences I wanted to keep.

I like to tinkle at my piano when I'm working out a new song - I just put my fingers down and see what comes out.

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

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

When children start to speak they find their own voice by imitating the sounds around them. It would follow that bands do the same. Bands will find their own voice at some point.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

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

What I look for in musicians is a sense of infinity.

I still picture myself as a student of the music. I'm always trying to learn new things. Music is just what makes me tick.

I didn't really hear any other music other than what my dad was working on until I was 12. My recollection of hearing other music was that I liked some things that I heard but I always thought, 'Where's the rest of it?' It didn't have the same amount of detail or instrumentation or imagination in the arrangements.

I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

Learning how to improvise really awakened my interest in music.