Roger McGuinn Quotes

I'd never written a song before 'The Blood'; I didn't know it was going to be a song.

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

I did co-write 'Moment of Forever' with Danny Timms. He wrote the melody, and I just did the words.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.

It took me a long time to learn how to write a good song.

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

That is what intrigues me; songwriting and song structure and expression.

I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.

Anything is food for starting a song. A song can start with a lyric idea or a melody or just a sound that inspires.

I try to find nice chord changes, that's how I love to start, and then I start trying to knock it into a song, knock it into shape.

I just sat down and thought, I'm going to write a song today, I'm going to give it a try. So I just stuck it on a tape like everything else. That was just another song.

I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.

Sometimes I have a melody in my head; sometimes it's just a verse. I read lines from a book or movies that I watch and grab a few quotes and start writing on paper. From there, I record a really rough version and work on the song.

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

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I write my music.

When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later.

I've written probably over 200 songs that have a verse and a chorus and that's it.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

I never write from concept. The beat is the beginning, and then I fill in the rest of the song into what it should be.

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.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

I really, really like writing songs.