Awkwafina Quotes

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

Plus, we spend most of our time writing music. Most of the time is spent in the studio in my house.

A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

Rap is something you can just throw on the skillet and fry up real quick. That's how it comes to me, my train of thought. It's like getting dressed - I don't have to sit down and stare at clothes, I just pick what I like and put it on. But rock, you gotta put it in the oven and let it bake.

There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.

I wrote my first song, 'Conversion', to this little hip-hop instrumental. I went to an open-mic, plugged my iPod into the P.A., and sang over the beat.

Sometimes I just hit the keyboard in a way I'd like the rhythm of the tracks to sound.

I like producing beats, and I like rapping, too. I have a program for the PC, and I can hook my keyboard to it.

With '5 Boroughs,' we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.

When me and Gucci sit down, I make tracks real fast, and he can write songs real fast.

A lot of people hear things on the radio and try to make their own version of that.

When it comes to making a song, whatever the beat tells me to do, I do.

I record into my phone as soon as I hear a track. Melody comes first for me, and then my gibberish usually forms into lyrics and a concept from there.

For me, it's always just about playing the song and recording it and giving it what it needs as a song.

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.

The difference between doing a remix and an original track is that when you do a remix, you obviously already have the original track as a starting point. But with the originals you start from scratch.

I love doing the music. I love programming beats and kind of working on the music as much, if not more, than the actual rapping.

I demo all of my songs on Garage Band, where I pretty much play everything - not very well, but I manage to hammer out a drum beat and a bass idea.

In high school I was making beats for my friends and for myself and rapping over them.

Before you worry about what genre it is, about whether it's a loop or a drum, it's about what suits the song. It's using what's within your reach, but also reaching for everything you can. I don't know if I always get it right, because I don't know every sound yet.

When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

But my role is to just apply the skills I've learned over the years: you listen to the guitar, you listen to the vocal melodies, you listen to the rhythm, and you come up with something that helps you take the song somewhere.

I get very deep into the writing and recording process.

That's what I like to do, I like to make songs.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.