Michael Kiwanuka Quotes

You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.

No one would choose to be jerked randomly off task again and again until you have half a dozen things you're trying to get done, all at the same time.

I'm on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It's great for jokes. But when I'm writing, I can't do anything else. I can't even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can't multitask.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

I started playing guitar when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I think that, within a week of getting my first guitar, I started writing music. I just love it.

I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single.

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.

So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.

As a musician, I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. I'm a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.

There's no magic for getting into the groove... just banging away at it. Sometimes the lyrics come first, sometimes the music.

I always interrupt work with other work, either in a small way or big way, so that's normal.

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.

If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It's like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention.

I've tried writing with music on, but I find it distracting.

You know, I've written many of my songs while driving - which is against the law in many cases.

I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.

I just do what I do. I like to make music.

I don't generally listen to music while working, but sometimes music can help me get past minor writer's block.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.

I listen to music constantly while writing.

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

I write my music.

I started writing songs when I started learning guitar.

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.