Neil Young Quotes

I'm constantly writing music and keeping myself busy somehow.

Jeff always had a huge part in making a song a record. You felt like you were capturing lightning in the studio. It was never boring. He always was there to serve the song.

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've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

I write songs on a course of time that's comfortable for me. I would probably never write a song from start to finish in the course of a day, hell probably not even a week. My mind is always going to change and my emotional state will also change on a daily basis.

I'm not one of these people who sits down and writes to say I'm gonna write a song about this or that, or a specific subject. The songs actually kind of write themselves.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

Don't think. The worst songs I've ever written happen when I think.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

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

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I'm contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don't come in with lyrics... I just go in and let it happen.

I've never sat down and tried to write something for some occasion. You just write the tune and stay totally wide open to everything. It'll find the person or persons who are supposed to do it.

I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't.

It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.

I knew there was something about 'Sun Medallion,' in particular, because I just had to record it the second I wrote it.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

Rap is something you can just throw on the skillet and fry up real quick. That's how it comes to me, my train of thought. It's like getting dressed - I don't have to sit down and stare at clothes, I just pick what I like and put it on. But rock, you gotta put it in the oven and let it bake.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.