Jim James Quotes

I go through a thousand songs to find ten for a new record.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

You get the beats. You write to them. You go in the studio and lay it down. Hopefully, a song comes out sounding good. If it comes out sounding good, you put it to the side with the rest of the other good ones, and you try to decide which ones you're gonna use on the album.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

All the signs were right. And when I mean all the sings were right, the only signs that we care about when we start a project of making a record is, do we have the songs - it's that simple.

Every record has been very different, so I can't really compare them. The first record was good. I originally recorded about half the songs on that one in 2003 or something, and then I went back a few years later and re-recorded them and added some other songs.

I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you're recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song.

Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.

A lot of getting a song done is booking the studio time.

All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.

When I make albums, I do a lot of songwriting but not necessarily a whole album.

From the engineer to the producer, all of these roles are critical to creating a song.

I've got my own studio, so I sit in my studio writing and if I get a great take, that's the take.

I'm always working on a new album because I'm always writing, and I'm always in and out of my home studio.

It's not the case of turning in a bunch of songs and recording the next month. I think you're looking for songs all year long and you're writing all year long.

Making a record with 'Depeche Mode' is not a simple process. It's quite complicated and long. We have the luxury of time. I'm not sure that's such a good thing when you're being creative.

I tend to name albums after one of the songs.

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.

I get very deep into the writing and recording process.

We'll only be playing four new songs live, but all the material for the next album is basically finished.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

Right now we're in the process of writing new material for a new record.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

I could have done a hundred songs, really. It was hard to narrow them down, because I tried to pick songs for the most part that actually did have some effect on me or influenced me in the past.