Kylie Minogue Quotes

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.

Usually, when we write in The B-52s, it's quite a collaborative process. We really take hours - and sometimes days - jamming, and then we listen and listen to them and go, 'Oh, let's use this part, and then this part.' It's really like a collage.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

When you work with a band, obviously you've got to present them with something they can get a hold of, so it has to be a little more fleshed out as a song. And then where it goes is more collaborative, obviously; it's more political possibly, certainly more a conscious process than a subconscious process, which the painting can be.

With our first record, we wrote concept songs but not a concept record.

Music is like wine, it ages beautifully - and if you spend enough time you can just sit there and listen to it entirely differently.

I've always loved that, on all the Dylan and Springsteen and Marley and Neil Young reissues that they've done: It's so cool to hear alternate versions and how the song started in their mind.

Music is a continuous process. You evolve with every song.

I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.

I'll get a few words and then go back to the music and then back to words, and play them off each other - and then I'll bring the song to the band.

When I first started making music, I wrote the lyrics first, but now, because the music has got kind of wilder, I've flipped it.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

Nothing goes full-circle with music.

I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.

I love to play the songs that got me to where I am. I like to take a little bit from all of my records and mix it up.

Whenever I write a new song, it always happens when I come back from Europe or Egypt or something like that. It's always from travelling.

I almost gave up on 'Door' so many times. I couldn't crack it. It started out as a simple song with just a chorus-verse-chorus. I felt like it needed to transform more.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

Each song is a small universe to me. Each song has a story of its own. Each has a full life to express in order to be complete, so it often happens that the building to a big crescendo feels right in the recording or writing process.

On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.