Aaron Dessner Quotes

I played around with GarageBand before, but I'd never actually made a proper song. So it was getting into the studio with him where I made my first proper song. I've always loved creative writing, so I had done that as well.

I'm always interested in writing. I keep music in journals on an everyday basis. I'm always looking for ideas that can be music.

I get very deep into the writing and recording process.

I write everything. It's my favorite part of what I do. And lyrics are my favorite thing.

I will write a verse or a story and bring it into a songwriting session, because that's what's big in Nashville - the collaborative part of songwriting.

People don't stress enough that when they're writing lyrics, they are writing.

When I make albums, I do a lot of songwriting but not necessarily a whole album.

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

Being a songwriter, my job is just to write songs for people. I'm not attached to them.

It's pretty amazing to write under any circumstances when someone gives you an assignment to write a song, even if it doesn't get accepted. I've written songs a couple of times, some for Disney, that haven't actually ended up in their films, but then you're left with a song forever.

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

It's hard to know exactly what it sounds like to me. I'm in the studio and I write it. and that's it.

For the most part, I like to record music as I write it.

I'd like to be writing songs for other people - I just like writing songs.

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

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

I'll hear a beat and think, 'How can I make this a banger?' I'll write the lyrics on my phone or on a piece of paper, and either way, it's going to be a slapper.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

They're mostly done before we went into the studio, although I do like writing in the studio.

Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song.

If I hear a conversation and somebody says something intriguing, my first thought is, 'Is that a song?' I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say which of these things do I want to record.