Jim James Quotes

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 didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I've always loved music, but I never really played anything. After 'Walk the Line' and learning to play guitar, and having that sense of performing, I think that certainly opened the door for me, for music.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

I kinda taught myself how to play guitar, and I still play to this day. It's become a pretty big part of my life.

There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

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.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

The day before my 16th birthday I got my guitar.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

I had no aspirations to be a musician, but I picked up a guitar for two seconds and haven't put it down since.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I usually sit around with the guitar in reach and grab it when I get an idea. Sometimes it lasts five minutes, and sometimes it lasts all day.

Music was something I found on my own. I got my first guitar when I was around 10, and it just all developed over time.

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

I would like to think that Ben and myself have begun a partnership that will take us into different areas of music that we can continue to write, enjoy and keep me involved with music other then what I do with RUSH.

When I think about that first DeBarge album, I remember being so green... just pristine. Nothing mattered to me but writing songs. I remember staying locked up in a room with my piano and just singing and writing songs all day long. I remember being a perfectionist about it... wanting to change this and fix that.

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.