Ian Axel Quotes

In our band, every member has input, but me and Steve do the majority of the writing. We start the songs, the rest of the band help us finish it.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to.

I never considered myself a songwriter, but now since I've been working with Nick Lowe, I am contributing to an extent. But I'm the guitarist and he's not, so we compliment each other in a way.

For 'Dynamite,' Max and Luke went to dinner and left me with a melody, and then I put it together.

Keith Richards has some sort of quote that says 'it takes two people to write a song,' and I'm of that school of thought, too.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

For me it's also - the music is equally as important. I mean I think as somebody who writes music, there just has to sort of be the marriage between both.

But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

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.

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.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

I have come up with very creative ideas that really didn't work with the song I was currently composing.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

I had my own musical ideas that Mick helped me with as well.