Ryan Adams Quotes

I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you're playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you're enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.

I've written my own music, and I play guitar.

I'd never written a song before 'The Blood'; I didn't know it was going to be a song.

There are no rules to writing a song.

I would listen to something on the radio and try to tap out the melody, then the harmonies.

I love writing music.

So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.

Music is about depth. Music is about harmony. Music is about notes and tones.

Melody is the first thing that comes to me when I'm songwriting. I learned piano classically first, and then I went into soul, and so melody has always been the first. It's so important.

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.

The concept is basically; that the pieces we know and love are made up of scales, arpeggios, and the like.

In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.

It doesn't take me long to write songs.

Picking up a guitar - I couldn't imagine doing anything else.

So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

Before you worry about what genre it is, about whether it's a loop or a drum, it's about what suits the song. It's using what's within your reach, but also reaching for everything you can. I don't know if I always get it right, because I don't know every sound yet.

The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.

I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way.

I really believe in melody.

Music is organized sound.

That's what I like to do, I like to make songs.

Once you really get into a song, other than just listening to it, it forces you to go 'oh, they did this. I never would have thought of doing that,' when you deconstruct it. It's something you really can't do sometimes when you're just listening to a song. You have to really get into it.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of 'Prisoner In Disguise' when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

Well, the first day we went through three songs, very basically.