Dave Haywood Quotes

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.

There's usually a rhythm and a melody in my head, and that creates an emotional state.

I don't know what aids creativity. All I know is that it feels natural to hold a guitar in my hands and sing.

I have to be inspired to write a song.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

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

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

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.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

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.

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

I have a tape recorder, and I just sing into it. I like to write that way. Sometimes I'll just get melodic ideas, and then I'll go home and sit down and add the lyrics. Or sometimes I'll get a lyric idea that I love. Usually it's pretty combined. Usually I get some kind of a lyrical concept and a melody and work with that.

It's fun and super exciting to see how other people work, how other people write music, and how other people put things together. To me, it's an endless learning process, and I love doing it because everybody works so completely differently.

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.

When I'm in a songwriting phase, it's a phase. I don't just suddenly feel inspired and then write a song, because I always write with a co-writer.

I'm not the sort of chap who can sit down and write music. When it comes, I'm happy.

One of the nice things about songwriting is you can be inspired by absolutely anything.

I feel like there are things that inspire the music, and then there's the music itself. I don't feel like I always need to force them together.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

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. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.