Song Development Quotes

For 'Dynamite,' Max and Luke went to dinner and left me with a melody, and then I put it together.

My initial ideas are just a starting place. As a record goes along, it becomes more about making discoveries and getting excited about new songs.

I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.

I saw that something changed in terms of the way I approach writing. I don't know. Before, everything was just sort of pieced together; and more and more nowadays I'll have complete songs - chords, lyrics, a melody - and we'll apply to those songs what we feel is required. That has happened much more on Humbug album than on any of the others.

I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.

More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.

Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.

I spend a lot of time working by myself developing songs, but I really need some other counterpart to help me pull it all together, because you go nuts working if I had to finish an entire project all within my own head.

Everyone's [ me, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty] equally involved in all the writing. Normally we'll start with a sample or a drumbeat, or a synth sound or something like that, and that will spark the initial idea. And then we'll write an instrumental sketch of a song, and then we put on a nonsense vocal melody, which is always my favourite bit because it obviously sounds amazing.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

The process is always the same. I get an inspiration for a new song, I put it down on paper immediately so I won't lose it. When I am ready to go to the studio with it, I play it a few times on the piano and edit, add, and type the lyrics and take it to the studio. Sometimes I don't have anything on paper.

I'm a good collaborative writer. I can usually come in and add a couple lines to something, and add a riff or a B-section, or a bridge that will tie things together. I can do stuff like that. But to write a whole song, I don't have the patience for that, I guess.

Once I've got something that I feel is strong, if I get long enough to think about it, it'll turn into something. I'll start thinking about the drums - what the drums are doing, what the bass is doing. Then, if I can remember it by the time I get to a recording device, it'll turn into a song.

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff.

Before we really started writing our own songs in the James Gang, we'd play covers, and then, in the middle of them, we'd go for a jam for four or five minutes. At some point, we had six or seven of those sections, and we didn't need to cover other people's songs anymore.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me...ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like...junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.

'Feel It Still' came around pretty much as organically as you can put a song together.

'Appetite for Destruction' was the only thing written with lyrics and melody fitting the guitar parts at the same time. After that, I got a barrage of guitar songs that I was supposed to put words to, and I don't know if that was the best thing for Guns.

A good idea for lyrics and a melody to expand on.

Songwriting is never one thing. I've spent as long as three months writing a song. Other times I've done it in twenty minutes.

Songs always get better after you start playing them live.

There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

I think, you know, for me, whatever I need to slot into to make that music the best it can be or help the artists, or whoever I'm working with, achieve whatever vision they have in their head for a song.