Josephine de La Baume Quotes

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

When I first started, the very first body of music I made when I got signed to Atlantic were songs with titles like 'Unify' and 'You're Special.' And there's this song that reminds me of Meghan Trainor that I wrote, about a woman's body and not conforming, when I first started in music.

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

My mom eventually told me if I wanted to be in the music industry, I should start writing my own songs. At that time, I was in junior high and had no idea where to start - I was writing joke rap songs with friends. Eventually, I wrote my first song in high school, and my mom took me to go record it with one of her band member friends at his house.

You know, there's still a lot of great songwriters out there who hand in songs. And there's a lot of brilliant singers and performers out there who sing other people's words. I enjoy doing both.

I appreciate a songwriter like Morrissey with so much restraint.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

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.

Working on music is the funnest thing for me, and I love it, and I could do it all day, all night.

I write contemporary rock with Jane's. And I also write house music with people like Kascade.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

I think it's a bit of a myth that if you can read music you can write music. It doesn't work like that.

My first song, 'Just Becuz,' was co-written by the awesome Baby Bash.

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.

I've got to be honest: I don't listen to any music now. I don't even listen to mine! I like to walk fresh into the studio and have ideas that come straight out of me.

John Mayer would be my ultimate collaboration because he's just the man. He has basically captured all I believe in with music.

I stopped writing lyrics down on paper after me and Jay-Z did 'Money In the Bank.' They're something I just hold in my mind.

I was asked by this British band called Kairos 4Tet to write lyrics for them. And I wrote lyrics for them. The album is called 'Everything We Hold,' and you can hear my lyrics.

'Welcome to Atlanta' was a song I wanted to do on my first album. The idea was for me and Outkast to do it, but I could never come up with a beat for us to do it. Outkast beats and my beats were very different.

'Tim Timtya' was different from what I usually do. I had to develop a texture to go with the song. In fact, many told me I sounded like Shreya Goshal, which came as a pleasant surprise. Transitioning from tracks like 'Sunny Sunny' to this one was quite different.

I started out with piano when I was little. That, for songwriting, is my favorite instrument.

As a songwriter, you always look for guys that you can write good with. Show up, have an idea, knock it out of the park.