M. Ward Quotes

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.

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.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

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

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

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

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 write my music.

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.

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.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

I'll have the music, and then I'll just turn the microphone on, press Play and Record and sing. And whatever comes out ends up being the melody.

I just want to keep writing music.

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

I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.

I do believe that when I'm writing music, I get addicted to the music of the concept of what the outcome of the song is, or the passion behind the lyrics.

At times I have a beat first and then I write. Sometimes I have a melody in my head and I pick up the guitar to develop the song. Other times I just write without any melodies, and I end up using those lyrics when I think I have the appropriate instrumental that would bring out and depict the emotions of what I have written.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.

I enjoy songwriting. It's slow-motion improvising.

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

I just sat down and thought, I'm going to write a song today, I'm going to give it a try. So I just stuck it on a tape like everything else. That was just another song.