Music Refinement Quotes

Songs always get better after you start playing them live.

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.

Writing can flow out when I'm feeling something strongly, whether that's joy, pain, fear, desire or anything else. The challenge is actually later, in the second or third or 100th draft of the music, when it can be so easy to cover up the original sentiments by making the music more ornate or cloaked.

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.

Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something.

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.

Our music is becoming more mature.

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

I'm not somebody who can tell if the song is good enough to be pushed until I hear what it sounds like after all the bells and whistles are put on it.

For the live shows, I'm just getting my song together. I go back to my hotel room and I just listen to my song over and over again, figure out how to make it different and put my little Pia spin on it.

I'm still on my demos. I'm still making my mind up and deciding what kind of artistic production to come in. I do things at home with my musicians but I would like an artistic producer to come in and work on them.

I want to take Justin Bieber for a month and just lock him up in a cage where we sit and make music. He's one of the most successful people in the world, but his music could be so much tighter.

Toward the later days of Sabbath, instead of going in and knocking out what songs we did in rehearsal, we would polish them to death.

People come with the record done but just need a little more sauce on top. That's what I'm good at.