Cass McCombs Quotes

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

I never walk into the studio and say, I'm going to write a song called... 'X' or called 'Slow Me Down.' I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of... I call it brain vomit. It's kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I'm unabashedly just writing it down.

I still maintain the fact that when I write songs, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't think about it pragmatically. I say what's in my brain, and sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's terrible.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

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.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.

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 basically just write stream of consciousness to a certain extent. I let the song kind of go where it wants to go.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon.

Don't think. The worst songs I've ever written happen when I think.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

Most of the time, particularly with this record, 'The Light of the Sun,' I really just been standing in front of a microphone and blacking out musically, you know. I'd come back a couple hours later and there's six songs from beginning to end, you know? I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know how I'm going to say it.

I wrote 'She's a Lady' on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones's TV show. Jones's manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don't have a pad of paper, I'll write on whatever is available. What's the difference? Paper is paper.

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've never sat down and tried to write something for some occasion. You just write the tune and stay totally wide open to everything. It'll find the person or persons who are supposed to do it.

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

When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.