Matthew Ramsey Quotes

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

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 sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

Songwriting is a mysterious art. When I sit down to write a song, the end result should be mysterious and have this dark quality.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

You're not gonna write a hundred songs and have a hundred entirely different ideas. It's a matter of finding the ones that are the freshest and most unique.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

I have to be inspired to write a song.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

The way I did the first album... the way I wrote 'Church'... was just to trust my instincts with the music and let it kind of do what it does.

One of the nice things about songwriting is you can be inspired by absolutely anything.

I try to imagine what the greatest song I could ever write would sound like, and then try to do it.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

I write songs, and I sing them. I never formulated a plan; I can't tell anyone else how to do this. But it feels right, so I just kind of enjoy it and get on with it.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

You never know what's going to play into what's worthy of getting encapsulated into a song.