Chad Gilbert Quotes

I think getting the rest of the guys in the band to write is important.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

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!

When you're in a band and there's five of you, you have to accommodate five people in every song.

We really try to make sure that the band writes the songs, not just one person.

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

A friend and I started a band together. I am kind of learning how to play instruments. We write stuff over Skype or e-mail. I send one part and he writes another.

When you have four guys in a room writing songs, it different. It's great - that's what makes a band a band. Audioslave was great.

I love being in a band. I love that collaborative spirit, although some would suggest that I don't get involved in the collaborative spirit, but it's not true.

A lot of the songs are written on piano or guitar, so I contribute, and I have done so since the beginning. So it's been good to be involved completely musically as well.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.

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.

Well, our songwriting process is pretty collective.

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.

If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.

When you work with a band, obviously you've got to present them with something they can get a hold of, so it has to be a little more fleshed out as a song. And then where it goes is more collaborative, obviously; it's more political possibly, certainly more a conscious process than a subconscious process, which the painting can be.

For 'Dynamite,' Max and Luke went to dinner and left me with a melody, and then I put it together.

Luckily, I'm in a band with two other guys who really pull their own weight and have the skills and abilities to compensate for my weaknesses.

I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.

I love being part of a creative process, so having a band to work with is perfect for me.

With Dream Theater, every creative aspect of the group went through me. I oversaw it all from top to bottom.

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