Neil Innes Quotes

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to.

I write most of my own lyrics for my album and I am helping to produce some of the songs as well.

A friend and I started a band together. I am kind of learning how to play instruments. We write stuff over Skype or e-mail. I send one part and he writes another.

I really had a great time working with 'Modest Mouse,' just because of the people. I loved writing songs with Isaac Brock, and Jeremiah Green is probably my favorite musician that I've worked with.

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.

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.

'Chandelier' took, like, four minutes to write the chords, then, like, 12-15 minutes to write the lyrics. Probably 10 or 15 minutes to cut the vocals.

I'd love to write a song that someone else sings that can actually sing really well.

I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.

With me and YG, he could rap a hook, and I could make a beat around it. Ten minutes, we done.

'Never Forget You' was the first song I co-wrote.

Obviously when you write songs you've got to record them, but just writing the songs is one of my favorite things to do.

I want to do a song with Rihanna - we need to make that work.

It would be fun to write with Adele, actually. She seems like a fun girl to write with.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

It takes a lot of people hours to make music because they focus so much on one thing. I just do it, and I make something you can just vibe to.

I've always been around musicians and always been the songwriter who doesn't end up playing the music.

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

I can write hundreds of songs on simple power chords.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.