P. J. Soles Quotes

Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up playing on another really good song.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it.

The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.

By the end of it, you never know how it's going to turn out. Hopefully if I pick the right songs and put the right melodies on it and all the collaboration works out. it's a win-win situation.

I'm basically a keyboard player, so if it's got a keyboard on it, I'll give it a shot. I played a lot of organ in the early days. I can make a few chords on guitar, but that's about it.

Out of all the artistic things I do, music is the most rewarding because it's so hard to write songs.

I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each.

I've sung other people's music all my life.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

You can really walk around a song and completely, if it's a good song, look at it from a lot of different angles. Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin illustrated that perfectly.

We'd love to collaborate with Sam Smith. I've told him. Many times. We've got loads of songs we've written that we can literally just hear his voice on.

Every album is unto itself, so whatever sounds we need to come up with, like way back when, we needed horns. So we invented the Lone Wolf Horns, and we learned how to play horns.

We [with Rick Rubin] would focus on the ones that we did like, that felt right and sounded right. And if I didn't like the performance on that song, I would keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one, that it was right for my soul.

I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

Over four or five years, I did six albums with three people: John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith. I felt that if I could care as much about their music as they did, I could be useful to them. I really cared about their music and their lives.

I don't know, whenever someone was like, 'Yeah, I'm going to the studio,' I just went with them. And I started recording.

I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.

I had to learn how to work in a studio at first because it's a totally different creative environment to the 'bedroom recordings' I'd done before, where I could translate my own ideas without having to explain them to anyone.

We really hated being in a band. The joy for us and why we slipped nicely and neatly into it was because we didn't need a band anymore. We became a duo because of technology.

I want to literally quit drag and go live in the woods somewhere and write music for my favorite female singers, like Miley Cyrus or Kacey Musgraves. I would love to be able to write music for them and hear these women I admire sing my songs. That would be like doing drag without having to get into drag myself.

I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.

Every artist and every song has an idea, and the producer's job is to capture it.

As a film composer, you have to be a good collaborator.

We worked with Max Martin's team, MXM, who are the best in the business as well. We worked with Stargate, which was phenomenal, and Victoria Monet.