Art Garfunkel Quotes

There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.

You have to have that organizational principle behind the song.

When I'm recording, I usually just mumble and hum a melody and then fill the words in as I go.

I think it's his perception of knowing how to make a record build, keeping the integrity of the song in the music and really adding a lot of musical elements to compliment my voice and to compliment the song.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

I always start with the music and then try to figure out what I want to write about lyrically.

When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.

'Chandelier' took, like, four minutes to write the chords, then, like, 12-15 minutes to write the lyrics. Probably 10 or 15 minutes to cut the vocals.

'Bright Star' has been designed and the songs have been formulated around the way that I sing. That is the biggest gift of anything.

A strong concept is the most important thing in creating a record. When you can listen to it and see a whole movie in your head, that's what separates an instrumental album from a beat tape.

The pre-chorus always flows and the chorus is always a little bit harder for me because I put pressure on myself. I didn't know that there was a proper way to do these things, so I just write what sounds good to me in my ears and then I hope to God that someone else likes it too.

Let Me Love You' is one of my favorite records from my catalogue. It's one of those songs that just happened magically.

Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.

'I Remember' was produced before the vocal. It's just another body of work in the long list of bodies of work.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

When I was writing 'Shotgun,' it's one of the first songs that's come to me as an image.

The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

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

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.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.