Jack Antonoff Quotes

When I do music I don't think about urban music, pop or country, I just think about a good song.

I was driving home and thinking about what rock and roll should be about. 'Adventure and Trouble!' I thought. I sang the song first and then added the chords later.

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.

Writing songs is a solo activity, so, if I put my mind to it, I can do it.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

I write my music.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

I don't have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. 'Silver Blue' took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and 'Prisoner in Disguise' took about a year and a half. So you just never know.

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.

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

I usually have an idea of how I want a song to sound, but I don't always know how to get there.

I don't sit down to write a country song. I don't sit down to write a rap song. I just sit down to write a song, you know what I mean? And I try to make that song the best it can be.

I think my best songs come from me sitting at a piano, bashing my head against a brick wall for hours and hours on end to get one good melody.

The songs will come as they come, and I'm excited because I haven't gotten to be really creative in a while. I'm excited to get back and do what I do and just write a song.

All I'm trying to do is simply play guitar and elicit this creativity from the instrument.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

There's always a personal satisfaction in writing a song by yourself. You get the inspiration, and see it through, and you're done. It's focused and very personal.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

My music is mostly for the music. And it gives the liberty to do anything which I want. And nobody limits me to one genre of music. But I learn from life and I try to give back to life, in a way, whether it's the thought of the song or whether it's the approach to the arrangement or anything.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.