Kerli Quotes

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.

We recorded several of Kenny's songs in the living room of my home.

It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

I think my melodies are superior to my lyrics.

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.

There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.

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 find so many songwriters today are missing an element... either the production is amazing but the songs aren't, or it's the other way around.

'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 love songwriting, and rap is part of my songwriting, but I'm not a rapper.

I definitely always thought of myself as a songwriter before a singer.

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

Singing is something that I have done all my life, but what I did on my first two records was to hide the vocals. They're there to thicken the web of the cello.

EDM has trained a new generation of listeners' ears to accept a much broader range of what equals a song. EDM has become top 40 stuff: those sounds, those styles, those ways of thinking about song structure - even thinking that vocals aren't necessarily the central element - those ideas have made their way into popular culture.

People think the chorus is the hard part in 'Take on Me,' but they're wrong. The hard part was making the verses bounce.

I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. I can accompany myself 'cause most songs are, like, four chords.

I'm pretty into music. Anything with music I love... I'm really big on lyrical content plus a good beat.

For 'The Anthem,' a lot of my fans were like 'Oh, man, he's getting lazy making just, like, a pop format tune that everyone's doing these days.' But on this album, I wanted to write songs with vocals that would get stuck in my head, not just movements of instrumentals.

I would love to do a complete EDM album.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don't write drum riffs first.

I like making dope music.

My sister's job does not involve music, but she is an amazing singer and songwriter.

'Somebody's Calling Me' was written in my sleep, and the original was just the piano and the beat and the singing.