Robert Cray Quotes

The Shins is, in a way, a recording project that turned into a live band. So I don't really keep myself beholden to any rules when I'm in the studio for Shins. I just gotta get it done as best I can.

I'm never too ambitious when I go into the studio. I always know that I'm just going into the studio to work on or try to develop an idea that I have for a song.

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

For one, the whole concept of 'Live From Here' - writing a song every week - was like composition bootcamp.

I love all Yes music and love to play it live, but I'm most interested in making new music with Yes.

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

I've always loved doing covers. Some artists don't like covers. Some listeners don't like covers. But I love them. It gives you a new perspective production-wise. It's easier for me, if I'm starting a new record, I like to produce a few songs that aren't mine just so it frees me up not to worry about it so much.

My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that.

I really have to be in a specific headspace to even begin to illuminate an idea that would create another Bon Iver record, and I'm just not there.

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

I wanna record these girls individually. And then, I wanna cut a blues album on me. But all of it, original stuff, you know. When I listen to the blues today, it's like they all sounds similar. I wanna do something different, to try to add to the blues flavor.

When I first decided I wanted to make beats and write songs and stuff like that, it wasn't like I sat down and the first thing I wrote was even halfway legit. It took a while to find my way through it.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

Whether I'm writing solo stuff, electronic stuff, or material for Motley, I just write to write. I come up with it and put things in different piles.

Normally when I do an album, I have a concept behind it.

I just wanted to make melodies. I started trying to do my own thing and let the melodies make the genre themselves.

I can't sing, but I'll sing over this chord progression, like, over and over, for however long it takes - sometimes it's, like, two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes - until I've found like a hook or something that I'm really happy with. And then, basically, it just like that's my melody, and that's where I start from.

You don't really learn how to write songs; you learn to develop as a writer, and you get to meet lots of musicians and figure out what kind of sound you want. You have the time to just develop and try different styles, and that's what I did.

I'm just writing less of my own music lately - I go in and out of phases a lot. Sometimes there are these accidents that just sort of happen, that are kind of waiting around the corner. I guess Modest Mouse was one of them.

Thundercat, specifically, is insane. I'm always surprised at the things he comes up with when we're jamming out together. I gotta try to keep up with him and his ideas, be able to respond without speaking, and come through with some more music. He challenges me to keep it musical and not so computer.

It's all about the balance. For musicians, me personally, you just can't keep doing covers or mash-ups. It would get old pretty fast.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

When I did 'Hand Cannot Erase,' I didn't have a specific singer in mind.

When I compose an album, I don't think about how to adapt it on stage.

I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.