Barry Mann Quotes

Oh, God. Mate, I've written about 800 songs, and that's no exaggeration!

As a songwriter, you might write every day and throughout the course of a year you might get four songs that are really special.

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records.

I'm always writing my own music, recording my own music, even if I am 9/10 of the time recording stuff for other people. I'm still working on my own creative endeavors.

I started writing music around 20 years old.

I'm not that prolific in terms of making my own music.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

New songs are why artists go on the road. That's why I go on the road. It's a three-prong play. Writing: You're intrigued. Recording: It brings it to life. And then you want to share it.

I kind of like polishing the songs that I'm working on. I'm really working hard on some specific songs.

I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.

It was kind of easier for me to do records that didn't take a year or two years of my life to write and to make.

It's not the case of turning in a bunch of songs and recording the next month. I think you're looking for songs all year long and you're writing all year long.

No, my son's a songwriter and he does that.

I never write from concept. The beat is the beginning, and then I fill in the rest of the song into what it should be.

When I start working on a batch of tunes - like roughly 10 solid tunes - I always know there'll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there's another song waiting behind it.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

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.

I'm always writing songs, and I've got a bunch that I want to record.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

When you first start writing a song, it's fun, then when you start recording it, it's fun, but by the time you've finished recording it, you're sick of it.