Sharon Van Etten Quotes

The whole background of 'Avian' is rain. I was just playing with textures and realizing you can touch music.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

Weirdly enough, if I'm having trouble with a guitar part - not the playing of it but the writing - I'll mess around with echo and other effects, just turn everything up and make it as crazy as can be, and it winds up taking me somewhere. I've found so many guitar parts from echo. It's limitless.

But Contra la Puerta was done mostly in the opposite way, starting with sounds and melodies.

The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea, and I can pretty much execute it.

The easiest way for me to tell someone what I do is to say that I'm a non-musician who practises and produces music. I don't have a theoretical language for music. I have this abstract dream language.

I'm doing more than just making songs for the radio. I want it to be a well rounded sounding experience.

I honestly just hope to continue creating music that people can relate to and connect with in a personal way.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

I think, for me, a way to really come up with new ideas and come up with new ways of writing music is to create a unique sound palette or soundscape for all the films I'm working on.

I write lyrics based on music, on a musical flow, and what sounds good at the time.

Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.

I be on some, perfecting my craft, just making sure the music is all the way there.

I want to be creative in as many different environments as possible, whether it's doing film scores, writing for TV ads or video games - all sorts of stuff, as long as it requires writing music.

In terms of creativity, both are equally satisfying. Music album is for yourself, where you compose songs and stuff like that, and in films, you have a story, characters, and songs penned by someone else.

I'm used to music as a tool, taking the various elements and then making something completely new out of them. And writing film music is the perfect opportunity to do that, because you can look at the film and then just let your imagination soar.

I don't write thinking directly about what I'm feeling, usually. I just let myself write whatever comes out without it necessarily being directly a translation of what I'm aware that I'm feeling, you know?

Sometimes when I'm writing lyrics, it's a very loose train of thought, and wherever that takes me, I let it flow.

Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.

It's like a painter with various layers of paint. I start with a drum loop and add keyboards, and then melodies start to take shape. The vocals happen later. I've never really done therapy before, but it's a form of therapy. Everything else falls away.

There are no calculations in the records I make. I record as many songs as I can. Songs that I think are my best.

I, for myself, have wanted to get more into producing because I want to be a part of the conversation and be one of the voices in the story we're trying to tell.

When I'm in the studio, I'm experimenting, trying things on.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.

I want to see the guitar in a non-linear sense that encompasses tones, arrangements, songwriting, audio production, and everything else - you have to do it all.