Tim Rice Quotes

My songs are somewhere between story and situation. There's also character and mood. I'm an intuitive writer, both with instrumentals and songs with words.

I do develop characters for songs, and I think of everything as storytelling, in a way. But I don't plan out what they're going to sound like. I just sing over what I've done.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

I think there are some songwriters who are just brilliant who can write and then I think there are some songwriters who can like me I have a problem writing chorus lyrics but I can write a song in a story like that.

Everything that Traffic ever did, I'd give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically.

When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.

When you write a song like 'Forrest Gump,' the subject can't be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

I thought 'Arnold Layne' was a nice name and fitted well into the music I had already composed. Then I thought, 'Arnold must have a hobby,' and it went from there.

I bring up 'The Heist,' and you can almost cut that record down the middle between songs where the beat came first and the words came second, and songs where the words came first and the beat came second. It can start with a vibe, a beat that drives a story, or it can start with a story and then trying to identify the tone to tell that story right.

It's writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that's broader than just figuring out a song. You're also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.

I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.

I have a huge note on my phone where things just start popping up. It doesn't make that much sense to me at the time, but once a song is finished, I can read into it and figure out who the characters are in my life.

Before 'Memphis,' I had never considered working on a musical. But when Joe DiPietro sent me the script, I heard the entire score in my head.

In terms of creativity, both are equally satisfying. Music album is for yourself, where you compose songs and stuff like that, and in films, you have a story, characters, and songs penned by someone else.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

You have to write a song around this specific character or to enhance a specific scene. A lot of other craft goes on.

I'm a big fan of the Pixar movies, and Ed Catmull, who wrote a book about his experiences producing them, talks about how it takes three or four years to get it right.

Writing dialogue is like writing a song, which I've done.

Songs are puzzles - you get an intro, or maybe an end, but you gotta fill in the rest. Sometimes they come easy and sometimes they're a pain in the ass.

It wasn't until I hung out with Dead Prez and understood how to make, you know, raps with a message sound cool that I was able to just write "All Falls Down" in 15 minutes.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I love writing every song I can like a little mini movie. I like to have a character, or some characters, and really paint a picture with the song.