Anoushka Shankar Quotes

I just believe in collaboration. I mean, I've written songs on my own, you know, but I think if the artist has something to bring to the table - someone like Pink, for instance - where they have something to say, it makes your job easier and more special.

When you're a songwriter and you click with someone, you tend to want to keep writing with that person.

In many ways, a song-writing partnership is like a marriage. Apart from just liking each other, a lyricist and a composer should be able to spend long periods of time together - around the clock if need be - without getting on each other's nerves. Their goals, outlooks, and basic philosophies should be similar.

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

I wouldn't say I worked with these people because I was looking for a particular vocal sound. I worked with them because I loved what they had done before-and because they really wanted to work with me.

Some of the best art in the world is collaborative, a mix of voices that are stronger together than separate. Take the Beatles, for example. Or every great movie ever made. We like to say they're the director's vision, but really, they're huge collaborations between directors, writers, actors, even producers.

Film is a collaborative art form. If you're not being collaborative, you probably shouldn't be working in film. You don't do it on your own. People who understand that, cultivate that, get the best results.

You don't realize how beautiful an idea is until you do it with other people. There's this really shimmery, awesome thing when you start finishing a song - where the song just starts writing itself.

There's no one songwriter in the band. It's collaborative, and we all have different tastes.

When I go in the studio with Post, I have a really good idea of what he's going to gravitate to, what we can work with.

I only want to write a song with the people who want to write a song with me.

In the 1990s music was a beautiful collaborative process between the composer, lyricist and director. They would exchange ideas and magic used to happen.

Even when I'm making my own solo records, I'm collaborating with people. It keeps things interesting for me.

I've done collaborations in all my movies, and I think it's part of what I enjoy about the process. This kind of intimacy that you create. Because it becomes very intimate.

Alice and I, we'd met before, but we were able to kind of sit and chat on the set of Dark Shadows, and talk about maybe writing some songs together. We started doing that, and then one thing led to another and it became this Vampire project - because he was telling stories about all those days, which were fascinating.

If I'm not writing about myself, then I sit down with people I really dig writing with and throw 'em out and see if something sticks. Their brain plus mine hopefully will make something interesting and cool and it will just snowball and we'll have a unique song by the end of it.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.

John Farrar, my dear friend and songwriter/producer of most of my hits (he wrote "You're The One That I Want" and "Hopelessly Devoted to You," among others), wrote the song ["I Think You Might Like It"] and it captures so much fun and joy! Having that reunion as well, with John and John - made the project even more special!

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it's me who has to come up with all the ideas.

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

When I'm a part of someone else's creative process, it's all about facilitating their ideas and hopefully bringing their perspective and making it a part of a song.

I'm not just a voice who wants to sing on anything. I co-produce, I want to select who comes in and plays on what songs, who to duet with and all of it.

I spend a lot of time working by myself developing songs, but I really need some other counterpart to help me pull it all together, because you go nuts working if I had to finish an entire project all within my own head.