Dan Harmon Quotes

The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

As a musician, you write and make music as you go. It's definitely in a great sequence. When you release songs, you think, "Let me make sure this goes with this so it's like a story."

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

If I write songs and I think they sound good, then that's it. That's what I do. I'm not a technical musician, which is fine for rock and roll.

I look at albums like novels. If you write a really good scene or a really good moment, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean that it fits with the story that you're writing.

I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.

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.

Whenever I start writing, I try to put together songs that feed the feeling of the movie.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

It's great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there's usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it's a broader, more abstract process.

In terms of creativity, both are equally satisfying. Music album is for yourself, where you compose songs and stuff like that, and in films, you have a story, characters, and songs penned by someone else.

I've always had good songs, it's the great songs that are difficult to find.

You kind of have to celebrate the moment that you get to create something that you love that falls into the parameters of a 3-minute-and-20-second song, to try to be creative inside of those parameters.

I'm not saying that every song has to be an all-time hit or the greatest ever music. That's not what you should set out to do. But you have to find out what will work best for a particular story or theme or backdrop, and discuss how not to make it a cliche or fall into such traps.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.