James Taylor Quotes

Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

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.

When I think about that first DeBarge album, I remember being so green... just pristine. Nothing mattered to me but writing songs. I remember staying locked up in a room with my piano and just singing and writing songs all day long. I remember being a perfectionist about it... wanting to change this and fix that.

I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.

I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.

There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

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.

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.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

Music is a whole oasis in my head. The creation process is so personal and fulfilling.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

I only do solo albums when songs are screaming at me to be let out of my mind.

When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

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.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

I try to write down every song that comes to me, even though I know that every song that comes to me isn't a song that I need to sing.

I love going into the studio with just an idea of the direction. Like, I want this tempo... I love to start from scratch, and the tracks sort of take on a life of their own.

You kinda don't know what's going to make a good song. You've got to shoot around in the dark for a little while.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I consider our music a catalyst, something that might spark a thought or a question.

The way I did the first album... the way I wrote 'Church'... was just to trust my instincts with the music and let it kind of do what it does.