Albert Hammond Jr. Quotes

I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

I am never without my lyric book. If anything inspirational happens, I have it there so nothing's forgotten.

I keep a journal and just kind of take notes. I don't really so much sit down and write songs - I just take a lot of notes, and sometimes I sit down and put them all together.

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

I'm not the best person at putting words together. I can't give you the melody. But I might inspire somebody.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

I've written songs on everything. Menus. Napkins. Little pieces of paper.

I keep a composition book with me at all times to write rhymes, to write down ideas, write down my thoughts, you know just so I don't forget any ideas.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

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.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

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.

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

If you're a songwriter, you have to do homework. You can exist for a while on the inspiration, but at some point, you have to sit down and have the discipline to write - to finish the poem, as they say.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.