Chris Cornell Quotes

It's always difficult to know if a song needs more than piano, and I worry about my tendency to go in a sparse direction.

I'm into the whole song-as-a-piece-of-music thing: if it literally doesn't call for it, if it already has enough stuff going on, then it's okay not to play a solo.

If I was talking about making a song special, I probably meant getting the lyrics and arrangement together, or getting some instrument that's going to tie the whole thing together. That can take months, or it can happen really fast.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

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.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

The songwriter mustn't fall in love with his own song. If it doesn't belong, he can't push it into a show. Let him save it; maybe it'll fit in another show.

The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact.

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

The melody will tell me what the song should be about, the tone of the song. That's when the intellect comes in. Because I have a list of possible titles and concepts, and I expand on that.

When I come up with a melody in my head, it could be anywhere: in the shower, on the plane, in bed - often when I'm on the go. I'll record it on my phone with my own voice, humming. When I get to the studio, I check which melodies work.

There are some great songs - like, I really like 'Snowcone' and 'Whelk Then' and 'No Problem.' I think I'm dissatisfied that it's not written from start to finish; it's over a year's worth of work that doesn't correlate.

As a song-writer I have always written with one instrument - either guitar or piano - because I believe that if a song is strong enough to be performed completely stripped down then it is a good one to go on and record.

I always try, when I'm singing songs, to interpret them the way that I would've arranged them. I think about the melody first, and then I pull out my guitar and start singing it.

Sometimes a song can be born in few minutes, if the feeling is right, some other times it can take days.

The music usually occurs to me as a complete sound, and then I have developed the skill of being able to translate that into a fully realized song.

When I was working on the music for this I didn't want to just use pop songs as the score - most movies do it and I've done it before.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

A lot of my songs, they're like puzzle pieces, and there's just one way to put them together. You could, if you needed to, get the scissors out and cut up things to make them work. But I don't want to do that.

When I write a song it's always from the point of view: makes the song the best it can be.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.