Jim James Quotes

When you're in a band and there's five of you, you have to accommodate five people in every song.

With Pearl Jam, everybody is so good at what they do, it's hard to get up the courage to say, 'Can I sing this part,' or, 'I want to play guitar.'

You write a song; you know what you want it to sound like. With a band like ours, it's more about the collective. It's important everyone feels expressed and represented.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

I think getting the rest of the guys in the band to write is important.

When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn't there.

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

It's easy to put on a Deep Purple record and say, 'That sounds great.' But why? Part of it is individual practice, but by playing together, a talent of meshing happens.

The first record we put out on Fueled by Ramon, 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea what the term 'producer' meant. It was just us writing songs, and we are trying to go back to that - singing in a room and vibing off each other.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

It's nice to finally have a CD out which reflects my songwriting, my singing and the band that I have.

I think, now that I've been writing songs in general, whether it's for the group or for me, I definitely feel like I got a little trigger happy, because it was so exciting to have production and create and put a lot in there.

In a band everyone plays their part, and I look at production the same way.

I'm usually just writing lyrics alone in my room, but I'm happy to be producing and writing chords anywhere.

Producing isn't just making beats on a beat machine. It's bringing together these string players with this flute player and this singer, and telling them to all work in the key of C major... You bring these people together and let them all cook.

Rick Rubin said, well, I don't know that we will sell records. He said, I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart's content everything you ever wanted to record. I said, that sounds good to me. So I did that. And day after day, three weeks, I sang for him.

A lot of times, I played bass on songs. Gene plays guitar on some songs.

In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

I love building a song up from nothing and jumping from one instrument to another.

I've always enjoyed the enthusiasm of the best studio musicians and, over the years, have collected so many inspired contributions from them.

My experience with Buffalo Springfield was that they did not rehearse.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I'm contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don't come in with lyrics... I just go in and let it happen.

Each one of us had a little story to tell and each recording was based on that. Lou played all of the music but we both sort of kicked around some cords during the writing phase.

My approach is to be part of a band that makes music, not hit songs.