Music Craft Quotes

We want to be good at our craft, whether it's writing music or playing it live.

I'm obsessed with great endings and crazy intros and stuff like that. I think we all are from what we've listened to and stuff, so I've always focused on great bridge melodies that just kind of naturally fit, or like a crazy ending at the end of 'Seize the Day,' something like that.

All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.

I like to keep morale up and not take things so seriously all the time. I enjoy life and laughs but I'm serious about the music. Serious about the craft of songwriting.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument - learning to do your craft - that's the most important thing! It's not about what goes on in a computer!

Billy Pilgrim music is very emotional. It's one part the craft we learned from people like the Indigo Girls and R.E.M., and one part the Tom Waits craft, where you're trying to create a moment.

As I got a little older, I discovered Lori McKenna and Patty Griffin and found out how many other tools we have as songwriters, that there's storytelling and there's ear candy, and that there is a place where they meet, too, and both of those women are really good at doing that.

I'm pretty good at delivering my songs, but I just want to perfect the craft by creating melodies.

I do look at songwriting as a lot of work. I don't over-intellectualize music as a special medium that only some people deserve to do. I think it's something you do if you put the work in.

Songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.

I say funny stuff in my songs sometimes, but it's still all in the seriousness of the music and the craft.

When people ask me, 'Are you a singer?' I say, 'No, I'm not a 'singer' - but I love the craft of singing,' going in and finding out what that means or why the hell I'm singing in the first place. My thing is really the craft of it.

Even when I wrote death metal songs for a death metal record, I was always trying to do my best to make it as catchy as possible because that's how I like music.

I'm 19 years old. I think I'm doing a pretty good job...Basically from my heart I really just want to say it really should be about to music. It should be about the craft that I'm making. This is not a gimmick and I'm an artist and I should be taken seriously.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.