Musical Output Quotes

I do so much music that it's like a fog, and I can't even remember all of it.

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

It was kind of easier for me to do records that didn't take a year or two years of my life to write and to make.

Ultimately, I'm not the most prolific person, but I've been doing this for a long time, and I keep on putting out music. The only thing that drives music is the people who are making it.

If you're not changing what you're doing and exploring different parts of your musical output, I think you're slowly dying.

I don't know how these bands did it back in the '70s when they would crank out two records a year and tour at the same time, which is incredible to me. I have so much respect for all those bands working so hard like that.

At the end of the day, I just like to make the best music that I can make and put it out to the world and see how they respond to it.

But I think it's hard for me to only put out one record a year. Because I get too antsy. But it's good I'm learning to do that, because each record counts. And you should make it count.

That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

I want people to know about all the kinds of music that I write. Some believe I just write film scores, which is not true.

It's hard to think back. I didn't even know I was going to do it, make actual records. But I was always making up songs, once I figured out that you could do it. I think it's pretty much the same, but there's less urge to get it moving out there. There was a time when it seemed like it was really super important to the audience and now it's just medium-important for people to like us. But that's okay.

For us, the pressure comes from internal matter of having recorded eight records.

It's funny, when I'm not on the road or doing stuff with Bad Company - or whatever- I've always written songs galore... a lot of stuff people don't even hear.

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.

Sometimes when you get frustrated, your back is against the wall, and you come out fighting and knock out three songs in as many days.

I write songs every day, 14 times a day.

I definitely don't sit down every day and make a new song.

It's hard not to go back and look at my songwriting catalog and go, 'Look, there are 600 to 700 songs here.'

I'm careful what I put out there into the universe, musically. I don't take it lightly.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

I've gone periods of maybe four months without writing anything, but it's not a problem. It just means something's building inside you, and it'll build and it'll build, and at some point it'll come out, and it does, and it usually comes out in three or four songs, and you play it that way, really.

An artist always know everything he does, you know what I'm saying, all the record he starts and don't end up in the public and just sit on the harddrive.

I've been asked why does Ireland produce so many great musicians, and the answer is it doesn't. When you count the great musicians Ireland has given the world in the last 20 years, you can do it on one hand.

I'm happy to write 10 times too much music.

Any musical output is emotional.