Mark Ronson Quotes

It took us three months to finish the arrangement of 'Thunderstruck.'

It's a different process for me, but it's really cool to hear someone else singing the song that you wrote.

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

Each one of us had a little story to tell and each recording was based on that. Lou played all of the music but we both sort of kicked around some cords during the writing phase.

When you first start writing a song, it's fun, then when you start recording it, it's fun, but by the time you've finished recording it, you're sick of it.

Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.

Growing up as a singer, and a cast member, and now as an adult, a songwriter, I get the luxury of choosing the kinds of songs that I want to sing, because I'll write, you know, hundreds of songs. Even though only 12 appear on the album. That's 12 that I've chosen to sing of my catalog.

I love song writing, so I'm always happy to write for other musicians.

Usually I write the songs at home and then I bring them in to the band; when we play them as a band, that's kinda how we figure out the feel of how they're going to be presented on the record or live.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

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.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

It was really hard to find people to come over and play guitar and sing and write songs together. So that turned me into a songwriter that way, just so I could be able to play with other people.

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.

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.

The recording process was basically me meeting with different writers, going into their studio, starting a song and just hanging out and chatting and getting to know how they work. Everybody has a different writing process so there was a lot of getting to know people, which can be fun and stressful at the same time.

I don't know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it... In the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced enough songs for it. Nowadays, there's three of us writing prolifically and trying to fit it all into one album.

In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have. It was a case of pulling whatever resources I had to get the sound I wanted, but that doesn't take anything away from the authorship. They are songs written by me that sound the way I want them to sound. Whether it's my voice or someone else's doesn't make a difference to the music.

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need.

Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.

I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

Most of our songs were written on acoustic guitar before they made it to the practice stage.

I've written a lot of songs but I haven't had the opportunity to record a lot of them.

It's good when someone says, "Would you write a song for this purpose," or "would you record a song for this purpose," or "would you help me realize this song," again, for this purpose.