Hilary Hahn Quotes

I feel like my music is like - there are always new influences in there.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

I try to write down every song that comes to me, even though I know that every song that comes to me isn't a song that I need to sing.

I'm always pulling and really feeding off of my inspirations. I think most musicians do.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.

Like many musicians, I don't look back much... only concentrate on what music I'm doing, and occasionally look ahead.

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.

As a songwriter, you tend to develop your own style, your own technique, based around what it is you're trying to write and perform, in terms of your own music. So a way of evolving a guitar style as a songwriter is much easier, I think, than developing a true style of your own just from listening to music or playing other people's music.

'Just What I Am' took me all of 10 minutes to make. 'Immortal' maybe took 30 minutes. It's not hard for me. 'Indicud' is almost what my first album should have sounded like, had I really been able to channel all of the ideas I had into music.

It is easy to write unthinking music.

Sometimes I might borrow something from a song I started a long time ago and see if I can grab something.

When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.

I absolutely insist upon adequate rehearsal time - particularly for the pieces that orchestras know best. Because there, the tendency is not to take them apart - rediscover them - and you must.

I never left music, I just left the music scene.

Many times you make music and someone decides to try and pick the best of everything. But if you wait, you sometimes fall out of love, or a song doesn't speak to you anymore, so you lose the moment.

You could say, 'Oh, we're gonna write the heaviest album of all time' or 'We're gonna write an album that sounds like 'Iowa.'' Even if we set out to try to do so, it would never compare. We're not those people anymore, we're not that band anymore.

To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you've got to put some time into it.

Being a rock and roll band is about spending time on the details so that you can hone your own identity.

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.

When children start to speak they find their own voice by imitating the sounds around them. It would follow that bands do the same. Bands will find their own voice at some point.