Michael Cera Quotes

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.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

I do always the music before the lyrics. The story or an idea for the lyrics appears during the composing process normally, but some other times I already have a strong idea of the story I would like to sing before any music comes to my mind.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

Sometimes I dream song ideas. I write a song in my dream, the melody and everything. But then sometimes I can't remember them. I think later on, I probably do.

We wrote a song, while sitting on a trampoline & we loved it so much that we ended up recording it as a duet

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

Sometimes I start with a great title or idea, sometimes a great melody will run through my mind; but the higher percentage of the time, the words and music pretty much come at the same time.

[The lyrics and melody] usually come a little simultaneously, but I would say the lyrics are first; usually I have the idea for a story in my head, or few lines.

Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

It's like a dream sometimes, a song just pops into your head and you can't tell if it's something you heard or it's new and you got to write it down.

I have this really beautiful Martin guitar, and it just kind of writes songs for me.

Writin songs is like a mystery. The most difficult thing to do is have a good idea. If you have a decent idea, the songs are the easy part. Actually having something to say is the hard part. If you get an idea for a song, then it pulls you along. There are just some ideas that you get that are really hard to edit out; it's hard to stop thinking about some bad ideas. So you just finish it and you end up putting it on a record.

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me...ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like...junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.

I don't write songs.

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

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.