Gavin Rossdale Quotes

With my gift, I can pretty much write a song out of anything.

Rap is something you can just throw on the skillet and fry up real quick. That's how it comes to me, my train of thought. It's like getting dressed - I don't have to sit down and stare at clothes, I just pick what I like and put it on. But rock, you gotta put it in the oven and let it bake.

I can't do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do - to do imagery. I'm not good at that. I just write from the heart.

I just sing. I sing whatever I can.

I try never to focus on the radio, just find great songs, find emotion and just write the best songs you can. I think when you get fixated on trying to do something too accurate, it becomes more washed out and less what you intended it to be. So I think each time the challenge for me is to try and reinvent a little bit.

I never decided to start singing, to be a singer.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

With great artists like Elvis, sometimes the songs weren't the greatest thing about him. When I tried to perform some of the songs, I noticed some of the tunes weren't all that brilliant, but it was the performance that sold them.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

I record cello Etudes that are fewer than four minutes long and post them on YouTube. How can one execute fully-formed ideas with utmost perfection, yet stay free enough to allow improvisatory nuance? This has immediate application in almost every area of life, but especially in performance.

Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

To sing a song is like whispering to a child's ear. It is an art heavily relying on improvisation.

When people think of someone being prolific, it's like, 'He's got a vault with 5,000 songs in it,' or something, but I just kind of pick them out of the air when they float by.

With Whitney she has such a unique sound and powerful instrument that she made those songs her own. She might as well have written them because she brought such a power and passion to them that were very unique. She has a great gift.

And he was going to give me a song, because I'm a singer and I wanted to sing in everything.

I'm definitely using different parts of myself, but I think when it comes down to words and melodies, I can't really force anything too much.

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

To be a good improviser, you have to study composition as a parallel. Because what improvisation is, on a high level, is spontaneous composition.