Jhene Aiko Quotes

I called the guys from Promise of the Real, whom I've been playing with, and they were all on the road. Right after I hung up the phone, I wrote another song and started writing another, and I'm going, "Hey, I can't wait. I should be doing this now!" My experience tells me that when it's there, it's there, and you can't make it wait. So I got Jimmy Keltner and Paul Bushnell, two good guys, and went in and did this record ["Peace Trail"].

There are still songs that I'm writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That's why I stopped doing mixtapes.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.

I'd always wanted to do an R&B and soul record; a friend with a studio asked to come by and record a couple of songs, maybe just make a 45. Then the songs started to pour out, and pretty soon we had eight or 10 songs down.

Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.

I never write from concept. The beat is the beginning, and then I fill in the rest of the song into what it should be.

I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I don't write a great song every day. I don't write a great song every couple weeks. It comes in such random times.

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

When I wrote songs like 'Everyone I Love is Dead,' I never thought about how I was going to execute them live.

There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.

Some of the best songs I've written, I've written in 10 minutes.

I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.

I do a lot of co-writing with my producer RedOne, and then a lot on my own. I just like to be creative.

Little moments of excitement shape the sound of a record. You don't have anything, and then you start to have little parts that give you the energy to move forward because you start to see something.

Sometimes, entire songs are ready in just about five minutes.

All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.

It's really hard for me to finish a song unless I have a strong visual in my head while I'm writing it.

I get a lot of my songwriting done while driving around Nashville - sometimes it comes to me that way.

It's never like, 'Now I'm going to sit down and write this or that kind of song.' The melodies may show up in the car, in the shower.

All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.

When I write - I always write on my own - I demo those songs on a four-track.

The fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing.