Alex Ebert Quotes

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.

As a songwriter, I listen to everything to be inspired... from Rihanna to Bruno Mars to Springsteen to Johnny Cash.

I tend to start with a full set of lyrics, and then my producer, Joel Little, and I work on the music collaboratively.

Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.

I've always had a lot of creative impact on the music with Timbaland.

My playing music is strictly for fun. When I was in a band, I was really excited to talk about it since I had never really played music to that extent. It was never meant as something I would consider as anything more than having fun with my friends. But I think I would enjoy writing music for the movies that I'm working on.

I get the music, I get the beats. And I go to the studios and write the lyrics.

I've just always been around great songwriters. To me, they were the standard.

I will write a verse or a story and bring it into a songwriting session, because that's what's big in Nashville - the collaborative part of songwriting.

Songwriters often seek the company of fellow songwriters to help finish what they've started, and these days, many do it at songwriting camps.

My first album after 'American Idol' I did with Desmond - we paid for it together, and we literally were together working on it every day for a year and half, just writing. We wrote in New York, Nashville, L.A., Sweden - we wrote with some other amazing songwriters like Diane Warren, too.

You should find the dopest producer in your area, and that producer is always going to want songs written to his beat.

Being a songwriter is really the base of being an artist, for me.

I'm always looking for great songs, and not being much of a songwriter, I depend on great songwriters to send them to me. I go through tons of stuff, and sometimes you just find material that kind of fits and becomes something special.

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

I'm not a great guitarist, but I do bits and bobs. I'm mainly a songwriter and a composer. I've done a lot of scoring and some stuff for British pop music that did pretty well, but I've mainly been working on my own stuff with Duncan Sheik.

I would be involved with music whether I had a career or not. I'm always going to be writing songs and recording them.

No, my son's a songwriter and he does that.

That's the cool thing, when I get to work with people I love. The biggest has probably been Kris Kristofferson on 'Bloodworth.'

The one thing I'm really the most confident in as an artist is my songwriting ability and ear for pop music. I'm really excited to show that off. It was a side that I wasn't able to show on 'American Idol.'

I'm always writing songs, and I've got a bunch that I want to record.

I am a musician, ya know; music is my world.

At any given time I'm listening to the Cory Branan, Leonna Naess, Eve 6, the King's Noyse, Sean Paul, Green Day, the BoDeans, Buddy Holly, Nowell Sing We Clear... the list goes on and on. But I rarely listen to music while I write. I start typing the lyrics.

I love producing, writing. I rarely write with other writers unless I have a real great respect for them. Like Burt Bacharach, or Carole Sager, or Stevie Wonder. Somebody like Smokey - like that. Otherwise, I choose to write alone.

I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs.