D'Angelo Quotes

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording.

Hopefully I'm bringing to rock n' roll the kind of spontaneity that I love, and always believed rock and roll stands for.

Most of the time, particularly with this record, 'The Light of the Sun,' I really just been standing in front of a microphone and blacking out musically, you know. I'd come back a couple hours later and there's six songs from beginning to end, you know? I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know how I'm going to say it.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

I don't rely on catchphrases or really like sing-along. I just do whatever I feel. Whatever the beat makes me say, I do that and I run with that. It's been working for me, so I'd be cool with that.

I hate it, it is tedious... when I write for my act, it is very improvisational, I write bullet points, I cannot sit in front of a computer; that is not my style.

I sit down and create atmospheres, start playing guitar or piano and just sing whatever comes out of my mouth.

It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

I learned from Van Morrison and BB King that the first take is the best. It's about capturing a moment. It's the same as love's first kiss. If you try to do it again, it doesn't work so well.

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

Sometimes I play something, and I haven't recorded it, and I don't know where it came from, why my hands did what they did, what key it was in, anything.

When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.

It's funny, man, sometimes you record something that you plan on re-doing later, but then when you listen back to it, you decide to keep it because you realize that it's gonna be real tough to beat!

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

Some of my writing is very subconscious, and that's definitely what happened with 'Body Language' - I looped some basic bossa nova sounds and just started singing.

I like a performance, a live performance, so I like little mistakes because that's what makes perfect - the mistakes.

I still maintain the fact that when I write songs, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't think about it pragmatically. I say what's in my brain, and sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's terrible.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

I'd listen to a song and say, 'Hang on, I like that piano thing,' so I'd play the guitar like that and get the vibe from it, and it just evolved from the get-go. It was pretty obvious what to do; You don't think about rock n' roll: you just do it.

That's the best kind of music: the stuff that happens based off intuition.