Nick Lowe Quotes

The studio is not the place to write. You need to be 75% ready when you go into the studio, and then the music can develop to the next stage.

I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.

I'd say 99 per cent of the time I write on my own, just with my guitar, and then it's trying to figure out what it needs in a production sense.

When I walked into the studio, the chorus of 'Nobody Love' was already set. For me, the challenge was to make it have depth.

I'm not really gonna stop. We've got so much stuff to do, so many songs we talked about, so many things to record.

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.

There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.

I wrote 'Actor' all on the computer. I didn't touch any instruments until I was in the studio. So while I had all these ornate arrangements, I didn't have any songs.

When you're playing in front of people, everything is external. It's all going from you out to an audience. When you're in a studio, it's very internalised, it's going from the air through you into this meticulously crafted, layered piece of work.

It's funny how a song can start in your mind, and then when it goes through all the filters, it ends up in a totally different spot.

'MMMBop' took about a year to actually get completed. The chorus idea had really been around for a long time, and then we built the song around it.

Once I've got something that I feel is strong, if I get long enough to think about it, it'll turn into something. I'll start thinking about the drums - what the drums are doing, what the bass is doing. Then, if I can remember it by the time I get to a recording device, it'll turn into a song.

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

I generally prefer to come in to the studio with a fully written song and then work on the arrangement with the band. Sometimes even the arrangements are pretty much already worked out in my head, but other times we experiment.

We're always in the studio pretty much, either at home or on the road, trying to come up with new ideas and stuff.

It's easy for me to write songs but hard for me to write an album; that's been my experience.

When you're doing an album, you need to come up with something new, be creative.

Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.

'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge' took a year to record; that's why the playing on it might sound somewhat labored. 'Balance,' on the other hand, was written and recorded in only four months, so the whole process was quicker and more immediate.

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

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

I think it's his perception of knowing how to make a record build, keeping the integrity of the song in the music and really adding a lot of musical elements to compliment my voice and to compliment the song.

When I start working on a batch of tunes - like roughly 10 solid tunes - I always know there'll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there's another song waiting behind it.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.