Julien Baker Quotes

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.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

I'm a professional songwriter - personal attitudes have nothing to do with writing a song.

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

When After Forever stopped, I didn't want to first find a band, then see if I could write with them, figure that whole thing out, then record an album. Instead, I worked with people I knew would be good songwriters out of an idea how I thought it would sound like.

'Reign' - and this might sound cheesy, but it's a dream I had. I dreamt everything that happened in that song, woke up, and wrote the song.

I like to think about the quality, content, and concept for my music because I think these are the most important things and it just molds everything together.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

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.

I love to musicalize things. You do employ a whole level of gravity. You use the emotional heft of music.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

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

(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

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.

Melody is the first thing that comes to me when I'm songwriting. I learned piano classically first, and then I went into soul, and so melody has always been the first. It's so important.

I always went in with a very specific idea of the sound I wanted, and once I'd recorded I'd try and make it sell as much as I could, but I only went in thinking of a sound I wanted. So, it's no surprise to me that he got the hit and I didn't. But what I realized was that he did dress it up nicely, and my god, he does sing on key well.

Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

I always look at my favourite photographs or favourite movies by James Bidgood or Sofia Coppola before I write my songs - they put me in the right frame of mind.

I find it extremely difficult talking about my songs because there's so many different things that can make a song come together.

I knew a lot of chords, but they weren't the chords that came with the melody that came with the idea I had for the song. Melodies are simple things. If you see a train wreck, there's a melody. If you see a little daisy blowing in the breeze, there's a melody.

It's always amazing seeing the song-writing process. A song just starts off as just an idea or a story you want to tell. It keeps building and building when you add the lyrics, the instruments, the vocals until you finally reach the finished song other people can enjoy.

I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody - if it works with that, then I feel it's written and there's something there.

You always want to write the perfect song. But no one will ever write the perfect song, I guess. I would just like to write on that has all the elements of what I'm tring to do. And I'm working on it. I'm always working on it.