Regina Spektor Quotes

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

I was a pop freak. I love music. Of course, I knew soul because I grew up in it. Writing it and everything. I love soul. But I love a tune that has some meat in it. Something I could hang my hat on. Because music is universal. Therefore, I felt no boundaries.

Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I live a normal life. But I'm always thinking about what I'm going to do next, musically. 'Do I need a fresh producer? What was Peter Gabriel doing when he was 32?'

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

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

Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock'n'roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I've done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

Great classic music that I've been turned on to has not only inspired and influenced me, but it has had an effect on my songwriting.

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

I'm not the sort of chap who can sit down and write music. When it comes, I'm happy.

It's incredible how much beauty exists in the world of music and how many artists you can really inspire with your own work.

I don't think there's such a difference between older and newer music as there is between one composer and another.

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

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

I try to steal something from the great singers. Of course, I don't want to imitate their sound, but I try to do a sort of compromise.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.