Neil Diamond Quotes

When I'm recording, I usually just mumble and hum a melody and then fill the words in as I go.

Rarely do I finish a song lyrically before I have a musical idea there, but then again, rarely ever would I finish a song musically before starting the lyrical ideas. So a lot of the time, they come in tandem, or they just come at a glance.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.

Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

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 usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

Sometimes I start with a great title or idea, sometimes a great melody will run through my mind; but the higher percentage of the time, the words and music pretty much come at the same time.

Sometimes I start just on the piano with a melody or musical idea that kind of leads me to certain lyrics.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I'd always wanted to do an R&B and soul record; a friend with a studio asked to come by and record a couple of songs, maybe just make a 45. Then the songs started to pour out, and pretty soon we had eight or 10 songs down.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

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.

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.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.