La'Porsha Renae Quotes

When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

I did co-write 'Moment of Forever' with Danny Timms. He wrote the melody, and I just did the words.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

I really don't do concept stuff very well. If I'm sitting thinking about what kind of song I want to write, within a few minutes, I'm kind of bored. It's just a personal thing for me.

I usually know what kind of song I'm after. I know what I'm trying to do when I start. I don't always get there. But I try to visualize what it's actually going to be.

I've always written songs with a visual counterpart in my mind that no one else can see.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

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.

When I was writing 'Shotgun,' it's one of the first songs that's come to me as an image.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

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.

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

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.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

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 graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.