Artistic Trial Quotes

Sometimes, I make 50 songs and pick out the best 10. I've been in the studio all day, all night, making the beat, writing the raps. You never know what's gonna be a hit.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

I can't sing, but I'll sing over this chord progression, like, over and over, for however long it takes - sometimes it's, like, two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes - until I've found like a hook or something that I'm really happy with. And then, basically, it just like that's my melody, and that's where I start from.

When I first drew him I had eyes in there and it didn't look right.

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.

I've often said to young songwriters when they want to write with me, 'Let's take a stab at ten songs, and we might get one really good one.'

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

I always considered, with every shoot, I was on trial; every time I pick up my camera and start out on the relationship, I am at degree zero. There is no coasting.

I like to come up with lots of different sounds. So the final version of a song might have been 10 completely different songs before we finally got it right.

There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.

Every time you wanted to do something, you'd hope it would score. You'd keep trying and trying, and all of the sudden, something would come right out of left field, like 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.' No one had any idea about that one.

You put some things out there. Some work, some don't, and then one really takes off, and that pays for your failures. Then you go on to the next one.

I like to really spend the time and figure it out and rehearsal is to try something that doesn't work. It's hard to do that, because you always want to go with your impulse thought and you wonder if that's the one, did that work, you know?

Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.

In my head, I consider 'No Turning Back' my 'dipping the toe in the water' album. It was mostly covers of favorite songs, and there were three originals in there. So, it feels like it was just my album to see what the temperature of the water was.

I try and write a fair amount in the beginning without the movie. And then when I do get the movie I create these demos, just mock-ups, and I throw them up against the picture and some of it sticks and some of it doesn't. But I'm very careful before I play anything to picture, because that's such a profoundly important moment.