Steve Harris Quotes

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. I can accompany myself 'cause most songs are, like, four chords.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don't write drum riffs first.

I write my music.

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

Nothing on 'Relapse' and very little on 'Recovery' was produced by me.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of 'Prisoner In Disguise' when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

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.

I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.

There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I've always had a lot of creative impact on the music with Timbaland.

I don't dictate the solos and I don't dictate the vocal harmonies.

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to.

I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

Whatever Kanye tells me, I just try to put it in my little machine and make the perfect solution for it. That's always our collab formula, and that's just how 'Gorgeous' came about.

For 'Dynamite,' Max and Luke went to dinner and left me with a melody, and then I put it together.

I've always wanted to collaborate with Shawn Mendes, he's an amazing artist, but the thing with Shawn is that I won't collaborate... me just sending some beats. It has to be in the studio where we'd both be there recording together.

In the case of, like, Childish Gambino, he is someone who is a writer by trade, so he is very meticulous about how he writes his ideas. I don't do this with a lot of artist, but he would give me a treatment that he wants to do, and I'll go off that; then I'll give him feedback and pitch him my ideas.

I don't care if it's Dr. Dre or Dr. Luke or Brian Eno. When you're in a studio and making music together, it becomes pretty apparent if you see eye to eye.