Tunde Adebimpe Quotes

I think that a good song is catchy, and a great song is not catchy - but it has a deeper meaning.

I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me.

Like a good song, life has verses, the goliards had taught me. Each verse has to be sung. It takes all of them to make a song. It is the entire chanson you name, but when you think of it, when you smile, it is a favorite verse that delights your ears.

I think there's thousands of good songs in the world - the songs that we can all sing along to, songs that are just so catchy they end up being in your head. But I think a great song is something that emotionally engages with you and connects with you.

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.

What makes that song, I think, is how stark it is.

I like to think about the quality, content, and concept for my music because I think these are the most important things and it just molds everything together.

There's always a tension between wanting to write a really concise, instant gratification type song that gets under your skin the first time you hear it, and wanting to really stretch out. I think it's a healthy tension.

I always think its easier for me to write without thinking about the strict meter that's required for songs and song structures and things like that. It's much easier to just write on the page.

My brother & I have always said that to write a song, it takes all the experiences of your life, plus the time it takes to write it! To be specific, yes, sometimes a song takes place in one session - together in one day.

A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that's the bottom line.

It's different obviously with a song when you're talking about narrative, you're talking about the verse leading into the chorus or whatever it is, but you have to have a sensibility of how something would flow either way.

With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

I would play all the parts of the song, show them the way it went together. Then I'd basically break down an arrangement - I wouldn't plan endings or beginnings - so they knew everything that was going on. I had the lyrics on a prompter so that I could remember everything I'd written, and I was able to just get into the groove and play with them. I think "Peace Trail" is one of the exceptions, where it's a later take. It just happened really quickly.

I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don't come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can't do a riff album. I'm more of a song, melody person.

I am nervous that the craft of songwriting is taking a nose dive...And since I'm a songwriter and I connect with an interpretative, you know, interpretation of a song, I miss it. I just miss it.

I would literally never think about melody. I never thought people listened to melody because I listen to words.

Songs have some kind of structure that connects with people's hearts.

Most of my songs are pretty sketchy. There's not a lot of bass sections. I don't write big bridges. Sometimes I'll try. But it's hard for me to focus that way, because I always think it's more interesting to just see what will happen next.

A song without a hook is like a train without rails. It skitters all over the place, bangs into everything. Boom! Crash! There goes Grand Central Station. Crushed by a train.

I start out with words, with the idea, the line. Then after I get a line or two, I try to find what melodic line those lines would be suited to. As soon as I find the form I can finish the song in my head.

The song could start with a riff that I base the song around. Or a chord progression or a melody I have, I just write a story about it. Lyric-wise, it's cool to have someone else's input too.

You have to write a song around this specific character or to enhance a specific scene. A lot of other craft goes on.

I think it's something to do with the structural quality of the songs. We weren't actually trying to make stuff that was cool, or of the moment, although a lot of it was. We were trying to make stuff that was good enough to stick around and lo and behold, it has.

I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.