Lucinda Williams Quotes

I keep this crazy notebook of song ideas.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

I've held onto little musical sketches that I thought could be useful, and the more time that I spend doing them for each film, then the more I have to draw on.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

There's always ideas buzzing around, but it's whether they actually end up materialising into a song.

I usually have an idea of how I want a song to sound, but I don't always know how to get there.

I'm just trying to work out how to write music now, because I've never had the opportunity where my number-one priority is writing music. I don't know how my brain works yet.

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me...ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like...junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

Oh yes, much, because music is just something that comes to you. You don't question it.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

I usually sit around with the guitar in reach and grab it when I get an idea. Sometimes it lasts five minutes, and sometimes it lasts all day.

It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

Honest, I listen to classical mostly. It keeps my mind fresh to write rock songs.

I'm not used to not having enough time to live with the songs. Usually, if I write something, I live with it for a little while.

I'm never too ambitious when I go into the studio. I always know that I'm just going into the studio to work on or try to develop an idea that I have for a song.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.