Johnny Cash Quotes

I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was, in a way, very basic. So all I wanted to have was drums and another guitar pretty much playing what I wrote on guitar, and I was just going to sing.

So when I was working with Amy Winehouse on "Back To Black," you know, she had all these beautiful songs, incredibly well-written and just her on an acoustic, nylon-string guitar. And she'd play them for me, and then I would kind of drum up my idea of what I thought - make a demo with what I thought the drums should be doing, the guitars - like, quite a crude demo.

We definitely were a punk band. When we got in with our producer, Richard Gottehrer, he slowed everything down so that you could actually hear what Belinda was singing.

I write songs. I perform. I play the guitar. I play the keyboard.

I always wanted to make rock music as well or as an element of what I do.

We write the song, then it gets played for the artist, and they somehow fall in love with it and go back in and make it their own.

I'm trying to make music that I like, and I love hip-hop. At the same time, I love guitar. I love rock and everything.

'The Rising' isn't Springsteen's masterpiece.

I'm a film composer, but I'm a hip-hop guy.

If you haven't heard my music before, 'Spirit Voices' is a great place to start.

I consider myself a songwriter... I guess the business end is my songs and the fun part is playing the guitar.

I sing and write a lot of pop, R&B.

When you put the guitars over the 808, it just makes it grittier and grimier. It's just different.

I'm always making beats, and when I can hear Ezra singing on one of them in my head, I send it to him. That's one of the ways that we've always worked together.

We [with Rick Rubin] would focus on the ones that we did like, that felt right and sounded right. And if I didn't like the performance on that song, I would keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one, that it was right for my soul.

The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader.

The idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio...well, that gives me satisfaction like nothing else.

Blending is just like writing lyrics or finishing up the song, rearranging and arranging.

I need all kinds of songs - fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas - and they all get juggled around during a live show. I've been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I'm always starting with that.

Ted Templeman, the producer, and Donn Landee, the engineer, are the same team that signed Van Halen, when they were called Mammoth. Donn convinced them to change it to the last name of the guitar player and drummer.

I wanted to be different and original but still have it be something my fans could get into. There also are some big, beautiful ballads. I told my producers that I wanted tracks that are going to blow up in the clubs, but I also wanted songs that were very melodic and with a lot of instrumentation.

When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.

I enjoyed singing, I loved song writing, I loved recording. All those things that involves with creating music was great.

I think a lot of electronic musicians are drawn to starting with texture because the whole reason we're working with electronics is to try to create new sounds or sounds that cannot be created acoustically. When you're doing that, it's nice to be able to just create a different palette for every single song. I feel like a lot of electronic music sounds like...Each album sounds like a compilation more than it does a band.