John Darnielle Quotes

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

A friend and I started a band together. I am kind of learning how to play instruments. We write stuff over Skype or e-mail. I send one part and he writes another.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

After Mad Season, I started writing my own music for Pearl Jam and brought it in. 'Given To Fly' came out of that, and so did 'Faithful' - those were on 'Yield,' which came after Mad Season.

I love being part of a creative process, so having a band to work with is perfect for me.

Usually, when we write in The B-52s, it's quite a collaborative process. We really take hours - and sometimes days - jamming, and then we listen and listen to them and go, 'Oh, let's use this part, and then this part.' It's really like a collage.

A lot of times, I played bass on songs. Gene plays guitar on some songs.

I learn stuff from making music every time I go in the studio. I'm continuing to try to find new ways to play in a song or be in a song and have a positive impact on a song.

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.

Although I have guitars all around, and I pick them up occasionally and write a tune and make a record, I don't really see myself as a musician. It may seem a funny thing to say. It's just like, I write lyrics, and I make up songs, but I'm not a great lyricist or songwriter or producer. It's when you put all these things together - that makes me.

When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn't matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.

When I did my solo album, I put on a song that I'd planned for Toto that never made an album constructed from a great drum track with Jeff and a bass track with Mike and the guys loved it.

Most of my collaborations, certainly post - Howard Ashman but even with Howard, are music first.

I'm always working on music.

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

Everyone thought my first album would be instrumental, but I didn't want to do it - it took me eight months to make.

If I ever do meet John Mayer and we end up in the studio, hopefully he'll bring the guitar, and I'll make a beat to it or something.

I just want to focus on creating more music.

Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.

Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.

I like to collaborate with other people for studio recordings because I believe collaboration, in any form, makes music better.

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.