Melodic Inspiration Quotes

Absolutely, I'm living my dream. Yeah. My wife always jokes, says I'm a big kid, you know, playing in the studio and coming up with melodies and sounds. And, you know, I wouldn't know any other way because I just have music in my head all the time, and I just love it.

I equally love both, classic rock and hip-hop. I love all music, really, and I really use classic rock a lot. I'm heavily influenced by that melodically in my music. I can't really separate the two.

Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. ... Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.

I wasn't writing the music. Ed would write a piece of music. I'd listen to it and come up with a melody and then we would arrange it. We'd put it together and I would write lyrics to my melodies.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.

I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

In the Air Force, I had an old Wilcox Gay recorder, and I used to hear guitar runs on that recorder going (vocalizing) like the chords on "I Walk The Line." And I always wanted to write a love song using that theme, that tune.

Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.

There's a lot of craft in songwriting. The divine inspiration is when the idea comes. It may be a riff. It may be a word. It may be a phrase. It may be a title. Sometimes, in the best of both worlds, that divine inspiration extends through the whole song. I've literally sat down and written a song from beginning to end, almost complete lyrics and everything without ever stopping...in two minutes. The chorus of 'She's Gone' was like that.

Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

That's pretty much how every song of mine works - I start with gibberish and melody and phrasing. I speak it naturally first. And then I think about lyrics that fit into that.

I could probably have an idea one day and then go into the studio and really wanna write about just that idea that I have in mind. Or it can vary with just a simple beat and I just do a bunch of melodies on the track that inspire me.

My songwriting process is painful. Songwriting is brilliant. It's a load of fun - when it works. It's really difficult as well.

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'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

I always start with writing vocal melodies before writing lyrics.

My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down... Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.

All my songs are based on melody, which is retrieved from my Jewish heritage. Melody will always exist no matter what the rhythmic changes there are.

I've been writing songs since I was a wee child.

Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody. I have a very strange melodic gift: melodies come to me effortlessly. So I write melodies-thirty, forty, fifty-then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide. That happened one time with Jacques Demy for the duo of the twins [in Les demoiselles de Rochefort]: I went to his house in Noirmoutier to play 35 possible themes for him.

I hear melodies and hooks all day. I've always been that way, since I was a kid.

I used to - my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

It's hard - some people get inspired by a feeling, but I'm mostly inspired by melodies.