Frank Ocean Quotes

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

I had a really pleasant time composing music for 'Raaga.'

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.

But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging.

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

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

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

Before you worry about what genre it is, about whether it's a loop or a drum, it's about what suits the song. It's using what's within your reach, but also reaching for everything you can. I don't know if I always get it right, because I don't know every sound yet.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

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.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn't have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn't important it would just be a poem.

The bass line is the anchor for me. I started with the bass, and either doubled that and then added the harmonies, or sometimes added my own harmonies that I've always wanted to sing on the song. And then it just went on from there - singing violin parts and trumpet parts and just trying to emulate the sounds of the instruments.

Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.

I write music every day.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical.

There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

When I think of Morricone, more than his using a specific instrument or a specific sound, it's his way of approaching music that sticks out.

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.

I'm always writing. And, I mean, I always counsel people when they call me a musician: I really do not have the skills of a musician. I really don't think like a musician, though I love music and I perform and sing.