Sondre Lerche Quotes

Songwriting's never been a natural art for me; it's always been a bit of a struggle.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

I don't know how to play easy.

My songwriting process is painful. Songwriting is brilliant. It's a load of fun - when it works. It's really difficult as well.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

Too many notes

When I listen to my favorite songwriters, they have such simple melodies and chords. I occasionally manage to stop at the right time, but all too often I keep on going until I have way too many notes and words. But that's just what I do.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I love writing music, but it seems I'm always writing words, so I don't get much time to do it.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

Generally, I like Indian music because the melodies are usually not too complex, which is how I like music, and that's the way I write music.

I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.

Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.

Writing songs is really about writing. It's not about necessarily focusing on one particular style or making it one particular thing.

I find it very difficult to compose when I'm not playing.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

Sometimes a piece of music in the score isn't effective. When a score is too well finished with too many elements, sometimes it's too much.

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

Oh, I'll tell you about 'Anyone Can Whistle' - the lesson I learned with doing that record is that the simplest songs are the hardest to do.