Jake Gyllenhaal Quotes

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

The three foundations of judgement: Bold Design, Constant Practice, and Frequent Mistakes.

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

I think it's always important to constantly keep the band on their toes and try new things that you hope will work. That's how 'Apologize' was born, and maybe down the line another little song will be born by that mentality. I've always really liked that song.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

When I started 'Record Collection,' I had no idea that it would come out sounding the way that it did, and that's one of the best things about the creative process, taking turns with the things you didn't know.

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.

Working with Prince, it's kind of like he's opened up this whole new world, especially with the horn players. And I'm like, 'Man, only if I had strings on this album, too.' And I'm like, 'I wish I had an orchestra.' So I just, you know - I just wonder what's next, you know. I just want to constantly push myself for more.

The combination of experience and experimentation will ultimately yield a personal sound.

Every day that you're on set is a new day to learn something. Every time you're there, there's something new that you'll notice or something that you'll miss, and you think of something new that you can do.

Sometimes you write songs that don't all fit together. What do you, just throw them away? This might be a chance for growth and learning. It could be a horrible fall-on-your-face kind of experiment.

When I'm in the studio with a writer, I don't mind for them to take the lead and show me something new.

I love writing with really experienced producers and co-writers who open my mind to things I never would have thought otherwise. We may think the same way about something, but they might say it in a way that I never would have thought to say it.

The entire making of 'Within and Without' was a series of experiments and trial by error. When I started writing, I didn't have a strong idea of what the record was going to end up like.

Some of my best songwriting choices started as mistakes or learning curves, when I accidentally hit a 'wrong' key or something. I try not to lose that the more I learn the how's and why's of piano.

Experimenting is part of the process. I remember when I was younger, I spent a whole year just writing on straight trap beats because I just wanted to be able to do that at a high level. So it's about perfecting your craft in every way.

Whenever we try something new, mistakes will happen. Seemingly good ideas will fail and need to be re-thought.

When you're successful at something, you think that you need to continue to do what you're doing to get the same result. But I think in order to get better, sometimes you need some failures.

With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited. That gives me energy to want to make new things, and it forces me to hear things in new ways, which then can only help to say things in a new way.

40% of what I've done was a mistake. I now call it R&D.

You could say that everything the musicians have learned and known over the years, all of their technical resources, are in a dialogue with the things they are discovering every time, as if it was the first time.

When you make content, you try things, and they don't always work. You learn from it and figure out what's next.

The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.