Dean Wareham Quotes

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record. I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like. I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla's bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, "Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play."

I'm only 49 years old. I'm still in the middle of this whole thing. I don't feel like it's finished at all. I'm still planning to write better songs.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

I was so young when the Killers started. I was 21. I'm proud of those songs, but there's no way I would write 'Somebody Told Me,' as I get older. Especially after having kids.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

I became a recording artist before I knew it. And I just - when I would listen to my old records, I'd just hear this young, extremely nervous fella that that made me want to run out of the room, you know, rather than listen to what he had to say.

I can put some chords together and maybe write a song, but I'm learning every day. And that's the fun part.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

I think when I first started discovering I could write songs, I was so naive. And it was after I got broken up with and had my heart sliced up into a bunch of little pieces that I was like, "I'm going to say this." I didn't even know how to play guitar.

I don't need anyone to write me a show in my style, I would like to do a show in a style that wasn't my style, because that's the only way I can grow up and grow out.

Some people, like Leonard Cohen, write one album every 10 years, and labor over a song for five years at a time.

People say, "How do you write songs?" I say, "Patience." I may have a track that's hot, but no words. I'll just let it sit for years, because I know they're going to meet. They'll find it.

Just coming to terms with the fact that I got to play April Wheeler [Revolutionary Road] and Hanna Schmitz [The Reader] in one year, let alone in my lifetime. I'm very, very aware of how rare that is as an opportunity for any one person. I can't tell you how much I've been able to take away from these experiences creatively. I really, really learned so much about acting, about myself... all of those things. It's difficult to talk about the actor's process without sounding like an arrogant asshole but they really were very challenging.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve.

I'm not here to write a song for you, I'm here to help you write a song for yourself.

Over the years, you grow up, you mature and you see things in a different way, and it's reflected in the writing.

I've been writing music since I was about eight. I would write sporadically. I wrote a lot of music in high school. I guess the oldest song on the record ("I Thought I Saw Your Face") is about eight years old. It's the old "I had my whole life to write my first album and six months to write the second one." I did, to some degree, but actually, a lot of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote really recently. So it varies.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.