Brandon Boyd Quotes

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

Drawing and visual pursuits were first. Music came and found me in a way. Really, what it's about is creative problem solving, and music is a lot more an expression of that than painting is for me.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

When I wrote 'Grand Illusion,' I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.

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.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

I love building a song up from nothing and jumping from one instrument to another.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

One of the great things that I loved about doing solo - which I ended up doing because I was too shy to ever try out for bands back in the day - I could sit there with a list of songs and 'paint away' for the show.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

My painting does not come from the easel.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

I play patterns. I'll make up a pattern and just play it.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.