James Taylor Quotes

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

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 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.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

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.

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 wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.

When I'm at home creating music, I usually wind up laughing. It's always, like, funny - like, what the hell did I just write?

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

I loved the guitar, and I had all of this music in my head. My passion for the guitar and the ideas for what I could create musically were equal. So that's where I was.

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.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

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.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Music was something I found on my own. I got my first guitar when I was around 10, and it just all developed over time.

Learning how to improvise really awakened my interest in music.

Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.

Success and the art of making music are two different things for me.

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.