Ari Lennox Quotes

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I'll be in the shower, and I'll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I'll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.

When I recorded my solo album, 'Keep It Hid,' in 2008, I'd gotten more interested in songwriting, inspired by reading Charles Bukowski and connecting with unfancy, interesting language.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

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.

I really have to be in a specific headspace to even begin to illuminate an idea that would create another Bon Iver record, and I'm just not there.

I record stuff all the time, like little vocal things. I write random things down... Sometimes I just get things stuck in my head and I record them, and that actually becomes a song quite a lot of the time.

Sometimes, the better writing comes when the song speaks through me and tells me what the song wants to say.

I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there's a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.

Sometimes, to be honest with you, our lyrics were written a day before the vocal had to be done.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

My brother & I have always said that to write a song, it takes all the experiences of your life, plus the time it takes to write it! To be specific, yes, sometimes a song takes place in one session - together in one day.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I'm creating songs. I do it most of the time, in the car or in the house.

You're always going to write and draw inspiration from things that you're feeling, things that you've felt. It's kind of impossible not to unless you're writing a song and there's an exact scenario that you're trying to write a song for.

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.

Usually, my rhymes are just in my head. I start off with a theme, and once I start rapping and writing and singing, the chorus and all that, it just starts flowing. Then it's done in about an hour! I write a lot of songs.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.

The process is always the same. I get an inspiration for a new song, I put it down on paper immediately so I won't lose it. When I am ready to go to the studio with it, I play it a few times on the piano and edit, add, and type the lyrics and take it to the studio. Sometimes I don't have anything on paper.

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.