Tom Araya Quotes

The band set up in January and just started rehearsing. If there was a song, we'd just rehearse it as a band, and it would get arranged as a band, and it got changed around a lot.

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.

I tend to start with a full set of lyrics, and then my producer, Joel Little, and I work on the music collaboratively.

My experience with Buffalo Springfield was that they did not rehearse.

The thrill of hearing your own voice recorded is still there, I still love it, going into the studio and thinking how can I sing this song and between the producers and the musicians you find a way of doing it.

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

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

I listen to Prince on my iPad. And I use a Chords & Scales app to warm up before performing.

I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

For the live shows, I'm just getting my song together. I go back to my hotel room and I just listen to my song over and over again, figure out how to make it different and put my little Pia spin on it.

I began both auditioning with Pearl Jam and recording for Eleven. In the fall of 1994, I joined Pearl Jam.

As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that's what I do, too.

Besides the two Christmas things, we've got a about a dozen new tracks we're working on.

I'd love to write a song that someone else sings that can actually sing really well.

I always like to write the songs, and they get turned loose into the world, and who knows what happens to them. That's the joy of being a songwriter. You get to hear what other people do, interpretation-wise.

You cannot enter a studio and just start crooning before the mike. It is essential to understand the mind of the composer, mood of the song, and meter of the tune.

There were lots of songs that were on 'It Still Moves' that I had written, and we had played - rehearsed, but also played live a couple of times - that could've gone on 'At Dawn', but we always knew we wanted to make a record that was more quote-unquote 'rock n' roll.'

The appreciation that we received after the release of the audio of 'Every Night and Day' is all because of Iulia Vantur. According to me as a composer of this song, she made this song sound very fresh.

I generally prefer to come in to the studio with a fully written song and then work on the arrangement with the band. Sometimes even the arrangements are pretty much already worked out in my head, but other times we experiment.

We write the song, then it gets played for the artist, and they somehow fall in love with it and go back in and make it their own.

You're never going to improve on a Michael Jackson song if you cover it.

I always try, when I'm singing songs, to interpret them the way that I would've arranged them. I think about the melody first, and then I pull out my guitar and start singing it.

It depends on the arrangement. It could take 3 hours, it could take 3 days, it could take a week. 'Thrift Shop' took one arrangement session. We did it all in a circle that day. 'Evolution of Music' and 'Evolution of Beyonce' took a bunch of different sessions.

Our album stuff, we bring it to our producer to help us finesse. But anything that's been on YouTube and a lot of the stuff that's been on the album, too, it started from us just sitting around in a circle and jamming it and finding where the parts fit.

At the end of the day I'm not just sending beats in. I'm mixing the song. I'm recording the song. I'm engineering the song. I'm in the studio helping with the songwriting. I'm doing the whole beat - every single piece of it is me.