Perfume Genius Quotes

I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.

I write most of my own lyrics for my album and I am helping to produce some of the songs as well.

I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

I don't write songs.

I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

The lyrics are always the last thing I do. I always have a recording of basic tracks and maybe some of the lead work. I'll sit back and listen to it, and I'll just concentrate on what kind of feeling it gives me. My goal writing the lyrics is to not disrupt that feeling.

Melody is king, and don't you ever forget it. Lyrics appear to be out front, but they're not; they're just an accompanying factor. If they're good, you're really in good shape. Lyrics are written to be rewritten.

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.

I mean Gorilla was really our first sort of goes at songwriting.

I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.

I'm a professional songwriter - personal attitudes have nothing to do with writing a song.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

'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.

I don't really love to perform in music. Some people like it more, but it's not my thing so much, but just the writing, when you get the lyric, and the lyric just goes just the right way, or you find the right bridge that takes you to the solo, and those moments are tremendous, and it's difficult to portray.

When I write the music for any of my songs, I write as a composer-lyricist in my head.

I always start with writing vocal melodies before writing lyrics.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

Any time you write a song, you kind of know what you want from it. You know what you're getting from it.

It's interesting what a new song can do to the other songs. A new song can be the grout of the record, tie the songs together, and define a new room in the house, helping the other rooms make sense.

The most difficult thing for me as an artist, as a creator of music, is lyrics. But everything else, I just do it.

I usually start with a lyric or a melody and then build a song around that.