Feist Quotes

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.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

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'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

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 just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.

There's a song called 'All We'd Ever Need,' which is actually the first song that the three of us wrote together on our first album, and when we wrote that song I didn't have any real experience to pull from.

I keep this crazy notebook of song ideas.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

When I think about that first DeBarge album, I remember being so green... just pristine. Nothing mattered to me but writing songs. I remember staying locked up in a room with my piano and just singing and writing songs all day long. I remember being a perfectionist about it... wanting to change this and fix that.

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.

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

I am a songwriter. I do get to put my personal experiences in song.

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

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!

It's so funny because I listen to songs that I recorded that I didn't really know anything about at the time. Later on I'm starting to feel the songs. Sing them first, feel them later.

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

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