Justin Vernon Quotes

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

I'm never too ambitious when I go into the studio. I always know that I'm just going into the studio to work on or try to develop an idea that I have for a song.

I'm inspired to do music. I really can't stop unless I stop being inspired.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

In my off-time, I do record. Once in a while, I'll just go into the studio if there's a really good song that I have in my head and want to do. I think, as artists, you're constantly in creative motion. If I stopped writing songs, then that's a part of me that would stop in my life, and I need constant motion.

I get into a zone where I'm really in my own world when I make music.

I couldn't have written things like 'Low' and 'Heroes,' those particular albums, if it hadn't have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

I usually sit around with the guitar in reach and grab it when I get an idea. Sometimes it lasts five minutes, and sometimes it lasts all day.

On 'Heartbreaker,' I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs. With 'Gold,' I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.

I only do solo albums when songs are screaming at me to be let out of my mind.

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

The music is in the lead here, and a large part of this, I have no idea what I'm doing. I feel a closer bond with the craft of songwriting, stronger than I ever have.

I jump into the process, and the record begins to gel at some point. Then I begin to get a picture of where I'm going. But it's not always something I know on the front-end.

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

I look forward to the future - and going into the studio to make new music.

There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

The creative part for me is making songs, and that's what I really love the most, and that's what I've always done for every band I've ever had.

When I first decided I wanted to make beats and write songs and stuff like that, it wasn't like I sat down and the first thing I wrote was even halfway legit. It took a while to find my way through it.