Frank Ocean Quotes

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

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.

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.

I don't write anything down - it comes from my head and my soul and my heart and my pain. That allows me to make the best music I can make.

At times, I will get in the studio and force myself to just write an entire front-to-back record, and 'Let Me Go' is one of these.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

Nothing is more rewarding than to take a song, create it out of thin air and then watch it affect people.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't.

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

I only do solo albums when songs are screaming at me to be let out of my mind.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

'Hatful of Hollow' and 'The Smiths' were lent to me, and they made me want to create music that might make another person feel like they made me feel - to have an effect on someone.

I've done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I'm onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create, and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.

There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.

So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.

I can't play anything until I find something that connects to my life, something I can carry as my secret map or code for the character.

Experience is definitely the high road once driven. It actually enhances the songwriting and song sourcing process.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

I look forward to the future - and going into the studio to make new music.

I like creating something from nothing and hearing it on the radio or on stage or from somebody driving down the street singing it. It's like building a house, taking a vacant piece of land, and next thing you know, there's a house with somebody living in it.