The first songs I made brought me to the Grammys. I was a five-times nominated teenager off voice memos and songs that were clearly recorded off different mics.
I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then.
I have, like, 1,000 voice memos on my iPhone.
Sometimes I'll be driving and a lyric will come into my head, and I will have to pull over and record it on my phone.
Sometimes I can't sleep 'cause I can't get a melody or a beat out my head, so I just have to wake up and, like, record it on a voice note.
So I use a tape recorder a lot to record ideas.
Yeah, I record on voice memos. I got like 1,000-something memos. If I'm in the middle of something and I can't get it done, I'll jot it down, but I never write a rap out, ever.
I use my phone to record notes or hum melodies. That's how I remember them.
With iPhones, nobody has an excuse for writer's block. If you're at Whole Foods getting your green tea extract and you have a melody, you just drop it into your voice memo and save it for later.
I'm a huge fan of voice memos. I put down many ideas there and sometimes I even use some of those audio files in my actual recordings. You get this really raw energy from voice memos that you can't get when you sit down in a studio with a microphone. There's this sense of immediacy, which I'm really drawn to.
