Miles Davis Quotes

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

It would be fun to write with Adele, actually. She seems like a fun girl to write with.

I think getting the rest of the guys in the band to write is important.

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.

Ideas are really what interest me in producing a band, if I can bring something productive to the project.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

Producing isn't just making beats on a beat machine. It's bringing together these string players with this flute player and this singer, and telling them to all work in the key of C major... You bring these people together and let them all cook.

A lot of times, people assume that I write all the songs: that I arrange them and I stick Kevin up there as kind of a puppet or something. It's absolutely not that way. In fact, he writes probably 60 percent of the songs, and I write probably 40 percent.

In the 1990s music was a beautiful collaborative process between the composer, lyricist and director. They would exchange ideas and magic used to happen.

I talked to the record company about what I had in mind. They said they wanted something lush. I figured the best thing to do was let them hear what I had in mind.

Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes.

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

When I'm a part of someone else's creative process, it's all about facilitating their ideas and hopefully bringing their perspective and making it a part of a song.

The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

When you're a songwriter and you click with someone, you tend to want to keep writing with that person.

I've composed a fair amount in my life, and some of them have made it on to the screen, some compositions that I've done, a few. And I like doing that. I had never really considered doing a full-length thing. I've worked with other people creating full-length pieces.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

I'm writing a record of comedy songs. I'm doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.

I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.