Joseph Haydn Quotes

The secret of a great melody is a secret.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

What I try to do is produce an atmosphere where musicians want to invest in what they do and give to the recording. I hire those musicians who I know will play something creative and interesting.

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

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

The creative part for me is making songs, and that's what I really love the most, and that's what I've always done for every band I've ever had.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Looking back on it now, I felt that I was blessed much like the masters, I guess - the guys who wrote the concertos.

I just write a song, and it just comes out however it wants to. And some of them are catchy songs like 'Here Comes The Sun,' and some of them aren't, you know.

When I'm recording, I usually just mumble and hum a melody and then fill the words in as I go.

I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.

I like writing melody without an instrument. It's just so - it's more like the choreography of a bee; you just go.

One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

Very often the music comes first.

I knew a lot of chords, but they weren't the chords that came with the melody that came with the idea I had for the song. Melodies are simple things. If you see a train wreck, there's a melody. If you see a little daisy blowing in the breeze, there's a melody.

Eventually I had so many little melodies and ideas that, you know, that they were all songs to me and I threw in a few cover songs like Enya's "Watermark," Bach, and my dad's song, "Song for the Whales."

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times.

So that's the challenge for me and that has always been the challenge - finding that melody, that riff, that thing that just lights me up and makes me feel like it's Christmas.

I guess every musician looks forward to a point where they can just kind of make an album that truly is like a nice art album.

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.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.