Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

It should take you 15 minutes to make a song, and then get out of there.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

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

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'

I'm always creating. Whether I'm writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I'm doing something.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.

I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King I wrote over four hours worth of tunes, and they were really pretty -but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn't toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide, on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

It used to kind of upset me when I'd be working on a part in my hotel room, and I'd get an idea for a song and find myself on the guitar for an hour when I should be working on my lines. But I've discovered that when I start to shake up my creativity it wants to be expressed in all kinds of different ways. They all kind of inform each other.

I imagine that when I am creating a song or a project or an album or putting some clothing together or cooking a meal, whatever it is, I don't really have a recipe. The fun part is to throw that big piece of clay in the middle of the table as hard as I can, and whatever shape it takes, that's what shape it takes, and then I start to carve away.

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

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.

I think that 60 percent of inspiration is organization.

It's hard to say how time factors into your work, because sometimes things will come to you very quickly, but it will take years for the ideas to be gestating in your mind.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

A lot of artists need structure.

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

I wanna keep being productive and creative.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.