Charles Kelley Quotes

When I finish a picture I don't show it to anyone if I feel it's not good enough yet. I've learnt to listen to my partners and my friends. For me it's the biggest success if they like it.

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.

Our album stuff, we bring it to our producer to help us finesse. But anything that's been on YouTube and a lot of the stuff that's been on the album, too, it started from us just sitting around in a circle and jamming it and finding where the parts fit.

I've worked with Childish Gambino for so long, so I've learned that from those producing skills - how to really produce music - where, of course, it's about writing, but it's also about combining sounds and styles and genres.

I like to record something pretty much as soon as I have an idea for a song, but I'm on so many buses, I have to record on my mobile.

In the 1990s music was a beautiful collaborative process between the composer, lyricist and director. They would exchange ideas and magic used to happen.

It is quite normal these days to record a song in the absence of the composer.

You're always thinking about making new music.

I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.

Keith Richards has some sort of quote that says 'it takes two people to write a song,' and I'm of that school of thought, too.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

I feel like when I get into most rooms, melodies come really easily to me, and they sound good in my head. I never really know until I hear the song back and it's finished if it actually is good.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don't write drum riffs first.

I consider myself a songwriter... I guess the business end is my songs and the fun part is playing the guitar.

I still love to go in the studio and write and all that.

I think that's one of the hardest parts as an artist, and creating a career, is the song is what is gonna lead you there. So it's hard to find great songs.

We travel so much as touring musicians and artists that sometimes, when you hear a great song that you really think could be on your project, you go ahead and record it instead of try to write it.

All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.

Writing a song is work. You have to go deep in order to mine the material and dig it out.

I can find myself in a situation where, by the time I'm releasing an album, I have the next one written. It is a bit old school.

I never complete a song until I'm actually going to make a record.

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

The fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing.

I can put some chords together and maybe write a song, but I'm learning every day. And that's the fun part.

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