Tracy Chapman Quotes

When I'm in a songwriting phase, it's a phase. I don't just suddenly feel inspired and then write a song, because I always write with a co-writer.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.

It's hard to know exactly what it sounds like to me. I'm in the studio and I write it. and that's it.

I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.

I knew there was something about 'Sun Medallion,' in particular, because I just had to record it the second I wrote it.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I've written a whole song in an hour.

I don't have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. 'Silver Blue' took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and 'Prisoner in Disguise' took about a year and a half. So you just never know.

Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.

If I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I'm just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I'll have a song in an hour.

I actually often write about writing music and being in that zone.

I don't think we ever really think about it when we're doing it, because if you sort of go in with a plan of attack, it tends to take away the natural rhythm of songwriting.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

It's gotta feel natural. I'm always into that, and after awhile, if I am working on a song too long and trying to make something out of it that it's not... it's best just to stop and move on.

When I write songs, it happens very quickly, sometimes 10 to 15 minutes, and I draw inspiration from everything.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.