The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.
Too many notes
Songwriting is such a personal thing and it's hard to be in a room with somebody you don't know and trust.
I just being able to write songs I'm proud of and finding some women to play with is exciting.
The thing I find frustrating about rock music is, how different can you make an acoustic drum kit sound, an electric guitar and vocals?
The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea, and I can pretty much execute it.
I don't care if it's somebody else's song. Most of the time, you'll find that I'll put my own stamp on it. But I started writing more because, you know, it's easy to regurgitate what somebody else is doing, but it's exciting to be able to come up with your own writing.
'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
My songs are somewhere between story and situation. There's also character and mood. I'm an intuitive writer, both with instrumentals and songs with words.
Whenever I write a new song, it always happens when I come back from Europe or Egypt or something like that. It's always from travelling.
I hate to say this, but I always listen to the music and the instrumentation first, and then grab on to the lyrics later.
We had a bunch of instruments around the house. Like, I played different instruments, trumpet, bass, drums, piano, all that, but whatever I could get my hands on.
I always had a feeling, for example, that there should be something from Verdi's "Requiem" in the film. You hear it when you see the lava flow in Iceland. That turned out to be a very easy choice.
Songs come to me and I hear them. At least in part, they are very complete; I hear the whole chorus, including the drum pattern, the base, the countermelody, the basic harmonic structure and the main thrust of the lyric.
When I think of Boris Diaw, I think of Beethoven in the age of the romantics
There's nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody.
We want to be good at our craft, whether it's writing music or playing it live.
Opera is the most complete art form. It includes drama, acting, technology (lighting), art (the sets), dance, and the epitome of the human voices. But mostly, go for the glorious music. The arts are crucial to the life of every community.
Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.
It's highly collaborative, musical theater, so everybody has got to somehow get along.
A couple of days working with Joe Jonas, I thought, 'This guy is a slayer of a singer; he's really funny, goofy, and sexy. We need to write that.' And that led to 'Cake By The Ocean.'
Gershwin inspired me very much. The concept of 'That Lucky Old Sun' was inspired by 'Rhapsody in Blue' - not influenced, but inspired.
A great solo does not make a great piece. Rather, a great solo in a great song - that's what makes a 10 out of 10. It's the combination of emotional feel and inventive ideas.
I was always into classical music and opera because I played the piano as I went through school and was very interested in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and stuff like that. That changed into heavy metal at around the age of 14 or 13, and I dropped the piano and started to play the guitar.
