Michael Stipe Quotes

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't.

I've done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I'm onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create, and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.

I've been working on my own music. I've been writing an album, stuff that's kind of personal to my own life.

You're always thinking about making new music.

At times, I will get in the studio and force myself to just write an entire front-to-back record, and 'Let Me Go' is one of these.

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

The more I do in my life, the more I can write music about new experiences.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Well you know, I've been into music my whole life, so to be able to put an album together with some of that music was awesome.

I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

When I feel like every day when I get up I'm writing songs, that's the time to make a record.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

At the end of the day, I think that I'm making music for me as that 12-year-old kid in front of my boombox every day. I try to think about, if I'm that little kid, what would he like?

I look forward to the future - and going into the studio to make new music.

I've never forgotten a single record I cut or a song I wrote.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

I love going into the studio with just an idea of the direction. Like, I want this tempo... I love to start from scratch, and the tracks sort of take on a life of their own.

The whole idea of doing an album is overwhelming sometimes. But, I get inspired when I get inspired and that's when it flows easily.