Tom Scholz Quotes

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.

I like to really spend the time and figure it out and rehearsal is to try something that doesn't work. It's hard to do that, because you always want to go with your impulse thought and you wonder if that's the one, did that work, you know?

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

For 'Narrow Stairs', the majority of the songs I brought in were guitar songs - songs we could sit in a room and just play. I can honestly say I had more fun and felt more inspired on this record than anything that we had done in a long time.

When I made Blue Moon Swamp, there was a lot of trial and error; I was trying to find people who would be simpatico with my style, and with what I had in mind for the album.

In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it's trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people.

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 like to come up with lots of different sounds. So the final version of a song might have been 10 completely different songs before we finally got it right.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

I wrote 'Despacito' with my guitar, but where you can tweak a lot is in the production.

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.

I don't know what the sound is or the song is until I've spent a lot of time on it. I'm always chipping away at it, rethinking it.

It's been neat to find out different writing strategies. I've been in the room with so many different writers. Sometimes, you write with tracks, and other times, with acoustic guitars. That's been really a cool thing, because it brings out different lyrics with you.

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.

Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.

I don't think I've ever spent more than an hour on any one song, but that doesn't count the thinking that goes on beforehand.

We try lots of stuff. We throw it against the wall, and the stuff that sticks stays in the movie.

And I like messing around in the engine room of music. Seeing what happens in the rhythm section area.

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

I write my music.

I think getting the rest of the guys in the band to write is important.

I tend to write and record things quite quickly. You can tamper with things for years, and it's artistic laziness sometimes.

I love building a song up from nothing and jumping from one instrument to another.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.