Jamie Cullum Quotes

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.

When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.

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

Well mostly in song writing my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes.

I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired.

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.

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 like to start with an idea, but then again, I might be sitting at the keyboard, and just playing a bunch of chords that sound cool together, and something just inspires an idea from that.

Sometimes I play something, and I haven't recorded it, and I don't know where it came from, why my hands did what they did, what key it was in, anything.

I'm not the sort of chap who can sit down and write music. When it comes, I'm happy.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.

Songwriting was definitely first. I started singing, and then I was rapping; then I went back to singing. As I was growing up, I just taught myself piano and guitar.

I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

It's weird, but if I decide to do an album, then the ideas start fitting themselves together. I consider myself a nice, slow burn. Plus, it's not a race. And I have a lot to share.

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me...ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like...junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.

It takes me, like, half an hour to write the lyrics for a song. They just come out.

I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is.

I don't know what aids creativity. All I know is that it feels natural to hold a guitar in my hands and sing.

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 started playing guitar when I was, like, 5, and I picked up playing drums when I was 6 years old.

Usually, I'll just be walking from my house to somewhere else, and melodies and words will start coming up, and I'll have to run home to write it all down.

What I do is, I look at rock guitar players, and I say to myself, 'What is this guy doing? What does he have that can inspire me?' I try to see what other people are doing and take what they have and turn it and twist it into my own thing.

Lately, I love creating ideas on my acoustic guitar. I sit in my living room for hours trying different chords.

I've played the guitar since I was 12, I've played the piano since I was 15.