Stone Gossard Quotes

Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

I get the music, I get the beats. And I go to the studios and write the lyrics.

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

I don't want to sound like Ross; I don't want to sound like Puff. I want to make my own music: French Montana.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

I'm dead serious about my craft and just really serious about making music in itself. I take pride in making songs and albums where no two songs sound alike. That's the challenge and that's what it's all about, to keep it original and fresh and funky.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

But then you have to write a song, so at that point, I picked up the reins and started to write lyrics.

I have to have a guitar sitting around. I sing in the shower. I sing around the house. The music comes secondary. The lyrics come first.

We are rich in the quantity of songs rather than in the quality. The singer has to go through hundreds of compositions before he finds one that really says something.

I can write music but I'm not much for words.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

I am not really certain how original my contribution to music is as I am obviously an amateur.

I think no matter what kind of music you play, there will be moments when you feel like it's all been done before.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.