Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

Rap is something you can just throw on the skillet and fry up real quick. That's how it comes to me, my train of thought. It's like getting dressed - I don't have to sit down and stare at clothes, I just pick what I like and put it on. But rock, you gotta put it in the oven and let it bake.

If you know how to freestyle, you will never have writer's block.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

You sit and you let your fingers go to wherever they are going to go. You wait until you start to hear something, and you start to figure out what it is that you're doing. And then you add another piece next to that piece, and wait to see if some kind of pattern or something interesting starts to grow, and then you cultivate it.

When I'm recording, which is synonymous with writing, I'll play things over and over again until it sounds like I've got the right guitar part. Whereas I think, as the much younger player I tended to do things much more consciously. I didn't wait for the moment where inspiration might strike. That's what I do now. I wait for it to naturally start to replay itself in my mind. As I say, I don't force it. So I like to think of myself as a receiver. I'm a telephone line to who knows where, but until I hear it through that receiver, I don't usually do it. It's got to start writing itself somehow.

I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.

I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

Well, I would say that music just happens with me, I'm not in the driver's seat when I am at the piano, the piano is.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

Music is closer to poetry than anything.

I've written songs on everything. Menus. Napkins. Little pieces of paper.

Music happens. It cannot be made.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

Any time is the time to make a poem.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

Composition is selective improvisation.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.