Twyla Tharp Quotes

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.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

When I start writing, I'll have a vague concept or I'll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.

When recording, whatever you first think about, you come out with something totally different at the end of it. Whatever plans you have you throw away, because it's always going to end up sounding pretty different from what you initially thought of. I probably only had about five or six songs when I started, and it just sort of flowed from that.

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.

I play with feeling so I need to hear what is coming out of the amplifier to inspire me; I don't just play mechanically. I need to hear what I am doing in order to create the next note. If I don't hear it then I can't feed myself.

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.

I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

Sometimes I play something, and I haven't recorded it, and I don't know where it came from, why my hands did what they did, what key it was in, anything.

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

A lot of our earlier material was freestyle tunes.

I actually often write about writing music and being in that zone.

Making music is mostly spontaneously following sounds you find compelling that you chase and see where they're leading you.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

When the muse hits me, or the mood, or whatever it is, I get my guitar out and I empty it out. I just start going through things to see what's going to happen.

When people ask that question, it's very hard to nail down a formula or a circumstance that I always write in, but I definitely do believe that there have been moments, musically, when I have channeled something, you know?

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

During those times like in my early years as a writer I could actually write a song in ten minutes because all of a sudden a song is writing itself, I'm just putting down words. It just seem each line that you put down flows with the other ones. It's like writing a love letter you don't think about it, it's something from the heart.

I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

I usually have an idea that I want to build on and let the music take me where I wanna go.

It's normally in the morning, just playing around. And I'm not saying everything I make is great, but that's what I do. I can't even remember how I wrote stuff.

When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.