James Murphy Quotes

I think, for me, a way to really come up with new ideas and come up with new ways of writing music is to create a unique sound palette or soundscape for all the films I'm working on.

I don't know, samples are just like unlimited ideas, you know? Sometimes a lot of people sample one song. A lot of it is also really just up to the artist and their creativity to see where it goes and what they want to do.

I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.

Really, I just sit down, mess around, and play with sounds.

Every time somebody asks me, 'Oh, when you mix your own music, what are you going to make?' And I don't know.

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

'White Rabbit' was mostly done in about two days, the music in about half an hour. The music is a 'Bolero' rip-off and the lyrics a rearrangement of 'Alice in Wonderland.' You take two spectacular hits and throw them together, and it's hard to miss.

I don't read music or anything, so when I produce, I go basically by ear.

Sometimes I listen to music and I wonder how did they get certain sounds.

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

What really excites me is the production. I get in there and change a lot of stuff.

I write all of my music.

I'm used to music as a tool, taking the various elements and then making something completely new out of them. And writing film music is the perfect opportunity to do that, because you can look at the film and then just let your imagination soar.

I worked on 'Cadillactica' with the mind to not sample as much and focus on creativity.

The difference between doing a remix and an original track is that when you do a remix, you obviously already have the original track as a starting point. But with the originals you start from scratch.

When I hear something new, mostly in rhythms, I often find it interesting to recreate it in a studio in a completely different way.

I've been gearing up for this future of writing a lot of new music by digging into my favorite old stuff, and twisting it around and highlighting the things I really love.

Well, I've been recording myself on a computer since I was about 13 or 14. So it's completely entwined with my creative process. Essentially, it allows you to make music that's better and smarter than you are, by using your ears to lead the way.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

I've wanted to do it for years, but every attempt at it has turned into another tune. We have actually taken a different approach, we're doing a lot of sampling - we're even sampling bits of Flash!

A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

With Dollars And Cents on the album, we had it as a band jam and I sometimes spend evenings playing with records over the top of things we were working on to see what works.

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.

Now everybody's sampling.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.