Don McLean Quotes

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

I don't write a great song every day. I don't write a great song every couple weeks. It comes in such random times.

Music is a big part of my life. I listen to different genres, and I choose the music that will inspire the next part of my story.

My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I sleep with a notebook next to me, and most nights I sleep with my guitar next to me.

I'm just writing less of my own music lately - I go in and out of phases a lot. Sometimes there are these accidents that just sort of happen, that are kind of waiting around the corner. I guess Modest Mouse was one of them.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

Many people say some of their best ideas come from dreams. Arguably the greatest Beatles song, 'Yesterday,' came to Paul McCartney in a dream.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

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.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.