Jon Hopkins Quotes

Normally when I do an album, I have a concept behind it.

I don't want to put 12 singles on an album. I want to make a story, a little movie.

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.

What is so beautiful about a composer and a lyricist is that their job is to push a story along and not halt it.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

There's a point with every record we've made that the album starts to assert its identity, and I think that's kind of what happened with 'The Wolf.'

When you're putting together a concept album, it's all about the flow and the story.

I'm always working on my own music, too. I've been working on a record for a few years.

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

At times, I will get in the studio and force myself to just write an entire front-to-back record, and 'Let Me Go' is one of these.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

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

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.

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

Nothing is more rewarding than to take a song, create it out of thin air and then watch it affect people.

I'm doing a record that has a story that runs through all of the songs, and then there is also a film that goes along with it.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.