Amaal Mallik Quotes

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.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

Every song you write you think is the last one you're going to manage. You put everything you've got into the song, and you've twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.

Blank paper always symbolizes the anxiety of the painter.

I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.

When you first sit down to write the first song, until you've maybe got three or four under your belt, it's always, to me, like a mountain to climb. You look at that one blank piece of paper and you think, 'God, how many songs do I have to write here?' It always feels like pressure.

When the news is slow, or when there's just so many other responsibilities bearing down on me that I don't have the time to do it right, that's when it gets frustrating. As an artist, you just don't wanna put bad work out. So when you have to do it seven days a week, you're just gonna have some bad days and bad weeks and bad months and bad years.

I think from a major-label perspective, if you were on the flip side of things and that's the world you were used to working in, your interpretation could be, "Oh, they're having trouble writing songs," when really it's like, "No, I'm not ready to write songs, I don't want to write a song right now, if I did write a song, it would be forced."

I wrote 'Criminal' in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.

Songwriting is hard - it's so easy to fall into the same traps. It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

The success of Torn was a bit too much for me. I took a year off and was still scared to start the second album.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.

I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

Some people make a great film and then they can't follow up.

I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we'd go for another two or three months and there weren't great songs.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

Look, I was only given a year or two to come up with tunes for this record, and when all but eight of them were thrown out for riotous behaviour, I got a bit ticked off; wouldn't you?

I'll probably never put out another album because I'm a tough critic of my work, and I don't think I could come up to those standards any more.

The thing I ran up against was everybody wanted a song so fast. It took me two years to finish 'Touch Me in the Morning.'

I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due.

I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses.

For Scary Movie 2, we had a due date and had to work fast. And though there's a lot of pressure, as artists, we just block it out. So really, the pressure comes from us. That's how the first movie happened. There was no outside pressure: we wanted to hit the audience hard.

To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it's all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we've got a fighting chance of writing a great song!