Max Martin Quotes

Sometimes, with more progressive songs, you lose that feel somewhere along the line, but 'This Means War' never quits - the energy is always there.

You want the song to be at least at the same level of goodness throughout. Whereas with something you're doing live, a song dips and rises and that can actually be worked to the song's benefit.

On those long notes behind the trumpet solo, if anyone lets his mind wander for a minute he is dead.

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

If a song is longer than three and a half minutes, it'll need something to keep you entertained.

Music does not carry you along. You have to carry it along strictly by your ability to really just focus on that little small kernel of emotion or story.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

My solos are more tastefully conceived now. But I still get going in places. It's just that I build up to it now. I don't race off on a solo. I take my time.

Just, you know, you can't put bread in a cold oven. You know, you've got to take your time. You've got to heat it up. So that's what, that's what I like to do with my music. I like to build it, and build it into a maddening, exciting crescendo.

An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.

The first thing I do is lay out that melody and figure out how it has to hold here and then finish to land here, because you know in advance you're going to want the melody to catch four things in the action.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

You grow as a writer when you learn how to make songs flow from start to finish. That's the best song, when it's such a seamless process to get to this release at the chorus, this euphoric feeling. That's why the Beatles were so good - they did such a good job building so much tension in the beginning to this immaculate release, and then it ends.

I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.

I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for 'Tannhauser' and brought it to completion.

Conceptually, I've always gravitated towards arrangements that weren't just presenting one idea. I like to look at my songs as having a main part, an interlude, and almost like another song at the end.

I would say that 'Creed' has a lot more music in it. It's 60 minutes of music, while 'Fruitvale' had about a fourth of that at best. There's a bigger focus in 'Creed' because I had to make music for training montages.

'Iceman' covers a bigger scope than 'Long Day's Journey.' But they're both fabulous pieces of work. 'Iceman' is like a symphony. It's got all the movements, all these different voices. 'Long Day's Journey' is more like a beautiful string quartet.

From a young age, I took an interest in the music and my mom noticed it.

Many people who don't like Rachmaninov's style consider the 'Rhapsody' his masterpiece. It's written fantastically well for orchestra and piano. He combines a lot of effervescence with a deep, Romantic spirit.

I was a guitar player in a band that had two keyboard players, sometimes two other guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer, four or five singers, and percussion. We did a two-and-a-half hour show where the music spanned from the early Sixties to the present. Whereas the David Lee Roth thing was like, Now. Very big and intense.