Stephen Malkmus Quotes

I appreciate a songwriter like Morrissey with so much restraint.

A lot of rap songs don't usually have a lot of melody per se.

I never thought 'Stairway to Heaven' was a long song. I loved how there was this part and then there was another part that was completely different.

It's cool that our stuff is received as it is, and our stuff is fairly long. But from a songwriter's purview as well as an exercise, I'm trying to write shorter material and find ways to condense ideas.

It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

That's one of the reasons I got into country music: because of the craft of that lyric and how much you could put into three minutes.

I never saw myself as the classic singer/songwriter who sticks to his guitar.

I almost gave up on 'Door' so many times. I couldn't crack it. It started out as a simple song with just a chorus-verse-chorus. I felt like it needed to transform more.

I'm a blues guy at heart, so silly music isn't generally what I do. I'm a I'll-cry-as-my-guitar-gently-weeps kind of guy.

Most songs have bridges in them, to distract listeners from the main verses of a song so they don't get bored. My songs don't have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them.

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.

Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it's overcompensating for something missing in the song's structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it's never like an assault.

You have to put these hooks in it, you know? You've got to make sure you got all that ear candy in it to get it through the gate.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition.

We are really in a rut with the three-minute song. You know where it's going to go. If you're trying to get your message across sometimes it's wise to say, Why don't we stop here and have a moment of silence, then go in a completely different direction?

I know texture is really important, but I think texture and stuff precedes songwriting a lot of the time these days.

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

Whenever I have a bunch of tunes written, I always find a kind of uniform that accompanies the songs.

I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.

I've always felt like every note of a song is of equal value.

Most of my records are very dense, composition-heavy, and there's bits of different kinds of music like an acoustic ballad, instrumental trio pieces, and vocal tracks.

I write a lot from instinct. But as you're writing out of instinct, once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, the craft is always there talking to you in the back of your head...that tells you when it's time to go to the chorus, when it's time to rhyme. Real basic craft... it's second nature.

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.

[Peter] Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was my first go-to song in terms of getting into the zone and getting ready and then I quickly gravitated to rock and roll music in the mid-'60s with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana. So many of them are still around and still going strong. I go out to see them all the time.