Juan Felipe Herrera Quotes

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.

I've always had something turning in my brain. And it got to a point where I felt it was stupid to let some of the tunes die. So I began putting them down on paper.

When I'm writing, I'm focusing more on just the basic melody and the lyrics.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

I really don't do concept stuff very well. If I'm sitting thinking about what kind of song I want to write, within a few minutes, I'm kind of bored. It's just a personal thing for me.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

I usually dream of melodies. When I wake up I have them in my head. I usually come up with things in the middle of the night because that's when my mind is the quietest. I always have my tape recorder, pen and pad by my bed just in case.

Usually, my rhymes are just in my head. I start off with a theme, and once I start rapping and writing and singing, the chorus and all that, it just starts flowing. Then it's done in about an hour! I write a lot of songs.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

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!

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.

I don't have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. 'Silver Blue' took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and 'Prisoner in Disguise' took about a year and a half. So you just never know.

I keep this crazy notebook of song ideas.