Sondre Lerche Quotes

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.

Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.

I feel my live shows are my music; everything blossoms from the live shows.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

I'm enjoying writing songs that are more stripped back.

It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.

I wrote my first song, 'Conversion', to this little hip-hop instrumental. I went to an open-mic, plugged my iPod into the P.A., and sang over the beat.

I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

It just doesn't get any more stripped down than going out totally alone and doing songs.

When I did the solo acoustic tour in 2010, I fell in love with that kind of performance.

I made a promise to myself to write songs I liked. I'm an acoustic singer/songwriter, and I need to be able play every song by myself on guitar. No matter what the production ends up being on the record, I've got to be able to go out and sell it all on my own. It's about connection.

I'm an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.

My deal will always be one solo performance-nominated or not. Not some thrown together rock tribute.

Obviously I still gig on my own, but I've always heard my music with a band.

Stand-up is probably the most solo performance in art.

There's nothing like the spontaneity of making something work on stage.

It used to be enough for me to get on stage and sing. I kind of crave the performance part now. I write knowing it's going to happen, which I didn't do before.

Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much, you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.

My favorite aspect of music is the performance part!

When I write music, I know a lot of artists like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran tend to write from personal experience. I write from personal experience, of course, but I don't limit myself to that.

Even when I'm making my own solo records, I'm collaborating with people. It keeps things interesting for me.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

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.

Some people can sit down and write a song, but they can't go on stage like I can.