Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music if you're going to be a writer.
I don't think people care about the mechanics of songwriting.
We kinda were a radio-rock band. We were still pretty technical, but I think the prog people hated us because we didn't do a bunch of weird time signatures... which are cool at times, but I'm more interested in progressive harmony.
Second edition of Earthworks I have the more traditional compositional approach, namely I write a piece from the piano.
I want to make great songs.
I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
My favourite chord? Bb6th with added 9th.
We must have recourse to the rules of music when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking.
A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images.
I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.
Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody.
I see music as fluid architecture.
Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.
I think Mozart's operas 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.
I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody - if it works with that, then I feel it's written and there's something there.
I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.
People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.
I found a favorite chord, which is B flat 7 - that's my favorite chord.
I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.
Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.
I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.
Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.
