Stephen Hough Quotes

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

I am playing the violin, that's all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

Learning how to improvise really awakened my interest in music.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.

I really don't chase songs. I get in the studio, I know what I gotta do; I'm pretty much programmed to do it.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I started out with piano when I was little. That, for songwriting, is my favorite instrument.

When I'm writing, I'm focusing more on just the basic melody and the lyrics.

The model of a composer.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

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.

I love music in general. It's like girls and their clothes and shoes; when you love shoes, you love shoes. So, for me, I think it's a really dangerous thing to say I'm going to write the best dance song in the world.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

I practice every day, I warm up before I play.

I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.

You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.