Adam Granduciel Quotes

I try to steal something from the great singers. Of course, I don't want to imitate their sound, but I try to do a sort of compromise.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

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.

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

There's a lot of music at my fingertips that I can be influenced by. And just because I play a horn, I don't need to sound, or try to capture, what was happening before me. I can just respect it and learn from it.

I wanted to give people a taste of my own music through the sound and style of my covers.

While listening, to things like western swing, for instance, I'd work something out in my head, then play it on my National; not the same song, but one that captured the feeling of the original tune.

As a songwriter, you tend to develop your own style, your own technique, based around what it is you're trying to write and perform, in terms of your own music. So a way of evolving a guitar style as a songwriter is much easier, I think, than developing a true style of your own just from listening to music or playing other people's music.

I don't think anybody really super-consciously tries to develop a style to play.

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

I don't really see myself in a lineage which is fine with me. Sometimes I do try to explicitly copy an exact song, an arrangement, a sound - and I fail. And so you can't even tell I was trying to do that thing. It makes sense in my own head but I'm incapable of copying.

You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.

What I do is creative. It doesn't seem like that when I'm playing a piece that was written in the past, but the score is just the outline and everything in it is relative. The key is to make this piece written by someone else belong to you and then connect to the audience.

I feel like my music is like - there are always new influences in there.

It's a great honor when somebody takes your song and does something different with it. That's what music is all about: to constantly change what somebody else has done.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

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

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I equally love both, classic rock and hip-hop. I love all music, really, and I really use classic rock a lot. I'm heavily influenced by that melodically in my music. I can't really separate the two.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.