Jim James Quotes

You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.

Once I got a record contract, and I took my songs which weren't quite finished, or maybe they were a good idea, maybe they weren't. I took them into the studio and developed them. They came to life and they evolved... and they're great.

I think that there's always great music being made. Always has been, always will be.

When I recorded my solo album, 'Keep It Hid,' in 2008, I'd gotten more interested in songwriting, inspired by reading Charles Bukowski and connecting with unfancy, interesting language.

Prince used to call me up 3am in the morning and invite me to hear some of his new songs.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.

I don't think most people who listen to music are that interested in all the work that goes into making it. It's the artist you like.

I was the kid jamming out to the songs on the radio, and now there's hopefully kids out there jamming out to my music.

Part of my growth as a producer was not just about making beats but also helping in the process of inspiring the song and making the song the center.

Without Mac Miller, there would be no GoldLink.

I'm only really good at making music. I wasn't convinced when I started out, but then I heard the first Stone Roses' LP.

The fans are always wanting new music, and with as much as I love to write, I might as well give them the music while I've got it.

Just like any songwriter, the songs come out of where I am in my life and what I'm doing and who I'm hanging out with and the kind of sounds I'm imagining. I always loved the idea of it evolving in the same way that life changes.

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song.

I would sit in my dorm room and write songs. I loved it. I was learning to sing and play guitar. I was becoming a musician. I was the beginner who somehow could write a song.

I like releasing singles because I can get them out there quickly and it's based on the changes, the sounds that are going on all around the world that I'm hearing and just a whole different bunch of influences which is sometimes hard to get across on an album because it can take a few months or a year to come along.

On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.

I write a lot of my music, but not all of it. I have always subscribed to the 'best song wins' theory when making an album.

When we first signed to Loud, we had a 20-song demo. So all of those songs we wanted to put on the album. But we started making new ones, and through process of elimination, we wanted all the new ones. We didn't like the old ones no more.

When I first started making music, I wrote the lyrics first, but now, because the music has got kind of wilder, I've flipped it.

I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'

Avicii's melodies were so simple and cool, and they were actually similar to the melodies I played on piano. I thought if I could teach myself how to produce and get those melodies out of my head and into the computer, maybe I could make some cool music, too.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.