Marketa Irglova Quotes

When you're in a band and there's five of you, you have to accommodate five people in every song.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

Generally, I like Indian music because the melodies are usually not too complex, which is how I like music, and that's the way I write music.

The lead guitar work is a bit repetitious, but when a song is under two minutes long, I don't have much room anyway. Thank goodness. But I've always contributed guitar parts to every band I've ever been in, so I'll always play the axe.

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.

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 write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments.

The basic idea is always constructed around piano or guitar and a voice, that's what we live and die by, because if you build up from that foundation, it's going to be strong.

I started trying to do my own music at home, and I was like, 'You know what, I can play the guitar, sort of. And I can do these things, sort of. And I can make these crazy noises on my computer, sort of. But I need a ridiculously good drummer. I need someone to help me with string arrangements.'

I never considered myself a songwriter, but now since I've been working with Nick Lowe, I am contributing to an extent. But I'm the guitarist and he's not, so we compliment each other in a way.

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.

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

It's nice to finally have a CD out which reflects my songwriting, my singing and the band that I have.

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.

I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion.

After Mad Season, I started writing my own music for Pearl Jam and brought it in. 'Given To Fly' came out of that, and so did 'Faithful' - those were on 'Yield,' which came after Mad Season.

It was important for the first piece of original music that I release to have a timeless feel because that's the type of music I want to make.

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.

I would love to sit down and do only the ukulele with a very small crowd. I would also like to sing the super poppy songs and all the background stuff. I think both would be an interesting path.

Songs come to me and I hear them. At least in part, they are very complete; I hear the whole chorus, including the drum pattern, the base, the countermelody, the basic harmonic structure and the main thrust of the lyric.

But the classic Tenacious D songwriting is Jack or myself will have an idea - I might have a riff - and we'll improv. And once Jack's feeling it, we turn on the tape recorder and start jamming, improv on that riff, improv on those lyrics, and then go back and see if there's anything good in there.

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 didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.

I really don't have a method. I gravitate towards the organic/acoustic, but I still often complete songs musically before attempting to find the lyric.