Tycho Quotes

On a good night, I probably make three songs, and none of them are full songs.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

I never write from concept. The beat is the beginning, and then I fill in the rest of the song into what it should be.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

We love great melodies and great songs that have great hooks and melodies, so we start a little bit more on that side as opposed to other people that start more lyric-based. Sometimes we'll do it the other way.

Everything starts and ends with the song, and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.

A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing, and because I probably didn't hear it that way. I'm not a songwriter.

'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.

There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.

'MMMBop' took about a year to actually get completed. The chorus idea had really been around for a long time, and then we built the song around it.

I'm used to making songs; that's how I learned to make music. My structures will always be more like pop songs than dance tracks.

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.

What happens with writing a song and demoing it, for me the demo always becomes the master.

Some songs take months to get right, but 'Let Her Go' was so easy. I was no more pleased with it than any other song I'd written.

With 'Slave Ambient', I was writing things on top of loops. Now I really get the structure of the song down, but I leave room for improvisation in the studio.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

When I collaborated with Nelly Furtado, the idea for the song structure came from myself, but the lyrics and the ideas behind the songs came from her.

'Free Mind' was a song written over a couple of years. It was pretty much three different songs that I couldn't figure out how to put together - until one day, when I was in the studio, it kind of just fell into place.

I pretty much started the lyrics and I hit a roadblock and I think Kerry finished them up. Then I came back and did the ending part. The whole 'Raining Blood.' That part. But it pretty much came together easy. It's a short song.

I had to embrace just basically writing and recording on my laptop. On long drives through the Rockies, I would take my laptop and mess around with ideas and make rough sketches of songs.

My focus on everything is songwriting, so I write all of my stuff by myself.

Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.

It's like a painter with various layers of paint. I start with a drum loop and add keyboards, and then melodies start to take shape. The vocals happen later. I've never really done therapy before, but it's a form of therapy. Everything else falls away.

With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.

When I write songs, it happens very quickly, sometimes 10 to 15 minutes, and I draw inspiration from everything.