Musical Development Quotes

The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.

I've been making music since age five.

I just wanted to have a look at my whole musical career, get right back to when I started and why I started doing it in the first place.

I would join a band, learn from that band and be committed and passionate and bring my thing to the band. Then, when I felt like we were going to repeat ourselves, and I needed to learn more, I would go somewhere else.

I got a guitar when I was six and, instead of learning other people's songs, started to try to write my own, even at that young age.

I got a chance to work with Miles Davis, and that changed everything for me, 'cause Miles really encouraged all his musicians to reach beyond what they know, go into unknown territory and explore. It's made a difference to me and the decisions that I've made over the years about how to approach a project in this music.

I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.

I never thought 'Stairway to Heaven' was a long song. I loved how there was this part and then there was another part that was completely different.

I was 15 when I started making music properly.

Musically, I'm always gonna take it a little farther, and Lord willing, people are gonna get that and understand that: that there's not really one genre I'm trying to be in, but just as a producer, as a writer, as an artist, that I'm planning on going farther.

Most of the time, I write songs with the arrangements all at once, in my head. There's the producer side of me that's always thinking sounds, like, 'Wouldn't this be a great sound if it existed to put in front of a song, to open it up, and then, when it did its thing, something else would happen?

When I was 19, I joined a rock band, and that's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.' When I came to Minneapolis, it just refined everything.

From a young age, I took an interest in the music and my mom noticed it.

There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.

You grow as a writer when you learn how to make songs flow from start to finish. That's the best song, when it's such a seamless process to get to this release at the chorus, this euphoric feeling. That's why the Beatles were so good - they did such a good job building so much tension in the beginning to this immaculate release, and then it ends.

I was writing songs by 12 and had a band by 14.

If you're stuck at piano and you're not a lead guitarist or a lead vocalist, you're kind of at a nine-foot plank then and you should do something about it.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

My music is how I feel, and that's changed from being twenty years old to being forty-three years old.

It's much better to play the guitar a half hour a day, every day, than not practice for a week and then jam for five hours one day.

I started out when I was about 12, playing drums. I started singing when I was about 15.

I have this theory about us. When we started writing our own songs, we were 17 years old. When you're 17, you write songs for other 17-year-olds. We stopped growing musically when we were 17. We still write songs for 17-year-olds.

I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be.

I got involved with classical music when I was in high school and it's followed me throughout my entire life and probably had a profound effect on my life.