El DeBarge Quotes

I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I don't go into any album with pressing issues. I just try to write songs.

I had no aspirations to be a musician, but I picked up a guitar for two seconds and haven't put it down since.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies.

Music is a whole oasis in my head. The creation process is so personal and fulfilling.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

It never gets boring for me because there's so many different things to explore in the studio. The studio's become the sanctuary that people have come in and found new things out about themselves, as weird as that sounds. But it's true, I'm no different. I've made some crazy hard records, and I've made a jazz album.

Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.

It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.

There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

I just do what I'm here for and that's to make that music.

I'm still a kid in his bedroom, writing songs and playing them.

I love going into the studio with just an idea of the direction. Like, I want this tempo... I love to start from scratch, and the tracks sort of take on a life of their own.

You kinda don't know what's going to make a good song. You've got to shoot around in the dark for a little while.

The way I did the first album... the way I wrote 'Church'... was just to trust my instincts with the music and let it kind of do what it does.

I'm just writing less of my own music lately - I go in and out of phases a lot. Sometimes there are these accidents that just sort of happen, that are kind of waiting around the corner. I guess Modest Mouse was one of them.

I'm always making tracks. I find that when you make tons of tracks, you stumble upon genius. You can't always turn the drum machine on and right away there's a hot track. Sometimes you luck out. But it can take a lot of time between thinking about the artist, listening to music for inspiration or going to clubs.