R. Kelly is different - music is always going through his brain. I remember we'd be having a conversation, and he'd choose a word I said and write a whole song to it.
All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.
When you improvise alone, you don't risk a lot, but doing an improvisation when you are two is even more difficult because you need to listen exactly to understand what is going to happen.
I don't compose, actually. I just record. I'm the opposite of a composer in my way of working. I'm more instinctive.
The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.
I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is.
I'm used to coming up with a lot of parts. And I don't have to do that so much [with Divine Fits]. This is the kind of band I've always wanted to be in because we never set up any aesthetic rules when we started it. We just wrote and edited, and it ended up sounding like Divine Fits.
You can't force music; It just has to come to you.
I still approach a scene as one would approach a solo. There's nothing set or pat.
I'm not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I'm not thinking about anything other than - I'm just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I'm just going to do it.
...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.
I wrote a song with Ed Sheeran that was kind of spontaneous.
That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.
Sometimes when I'm writing lyrics, it's a very loose train of thought, and wherever that takes me, I let it flow.
I do a so-called trip into myself: I sit down at the piano and the melody might start to evolve from my playing or then I might start to sing it.
I guess everywhere I go, I get inspired by those places, and then I have a bunch of Voicenotes on my phone. Everywhere I go, I think of these random melodies. It's crazy because everywhere you go, the melodies are totally different.
Whenever I make music, I just make it depending on however I feel at that moment and what I'm getting inspiration from, so it depends - whatever, it's just my mood.
Jazz is restless. It won't stay put & it never will.
Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play.
I started writing songs before I could talk - at three or four. It was in me, and I had to get it out. It was all freestyle, which is how I write anyway. I don't write the words down; I scat and come up with the melody, then the lyrics.
I think jazz is a phenomenal creative force, because it's one man, one vote as you're playing, but it's a collective thing, what you're doing. You're listening to all the musicians around you and you're working within that structure.
I let the song come to me. Then that thing comes to you, and you just know what that thing is. Music isn't like a 9-to-5 job. You never know. It's just the most unpredictable thing.
With 'Hannibal,' it's like reactive scoring so I don't get ahead. I don't read a script; I don't want to know what's going to happen until its happening in front of me and I'm able to have an instrument in my hands that I'm playing to make some kind of a map, some sort of tonal map, that I can then build on.
When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.
