Max Martin Quotes

I find lyrics can come at any time during the day, as can music.

Usually, I'll just be walking from my house to somewhere else, and melodies and words will start coming up, and I'll have to run home to write it all down.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

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

I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I'll be in the shower, and I'll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I'll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.

I usually sit around with the guitar in reach and grab it when I get an idea. Sometimes it lasts five minutes, and sometimes it lasts all day.

I like to come up with the melodies, and I have a lot of ideas as far as structure goes.

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.

When I write songs, it's very random. I get influenced by the most random things! Sometimes it just comes to me in my sleep or just hanging out in a restaurant or something. Music just comes to me, and I'll start writing from there.

Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I'd force myself to sit down until I came up with something.

I have a tape recorder, and I just sing into it. I like to write that way. Sometimes I'll just get melodic ideas, and then I'll go home and sit down and add the lyrics. Or sometimes I'll get a lyric idea that I love. Usually it's pretty combined. Usually I get some kind of a lyrical concept and a melody and work with that.

My songs pretty much revolve in my brain most of the time - usually, whatever's coming next.

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

I do always the music before the lyrics. The story or an idea for the lyrics appears during the composing process normally, but some other times I already have a strong idea of the story I would like to sing before any music comes to my mind.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

What happens a lot with songwriting is that a melody or rhythm or something stays with you like catching a cold. And during that time what happens is that I can then fit things on to it, it all fits and glues together. Sometimes it's crazy cos it can almost be anything. But if you catch the cold then the nonsense makes sense. It's like you're getting beamed it, like with a ouija board and something's pushing your hand. It's not a pleasant experience necessarily.

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.

It's like a dream sometimes, a song just pops into your head and you can't tell if it's something you heard or it's new and you got to write it down.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else.

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