Danny Elfman Quotes

I really believe in melody.

If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.

A melody without the right rhythm hardly exists.

I find when I'm more awake, I tend to think more of the structure and movement of a tune, abrupt transitions, etc.; things becoming more composed.

When I hear the piano played in a compositional way, like in a songwriter's way in a compositional way, there's a certain arc to that that I love.

Music is first, lyrics are secondary.

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.

So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.

It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

I always begin to compose the melody first.

All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

And you don't want to just totally mess up the rhythm when you're playing with Bob Dylan.

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

I'm a composer, and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.

I've always really liked the rhythm element of songs.

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 just hear a beat and start mumbling words. I just hear sounds and rhythms, and it just kind of comes intuitively. Formatting a song, figuring out a flow, how I respond to the beat.

When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.

I think I'm much more of a guitar-songwriter than a singer. I start with chords and then test out melodies rather than improvising over it.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.

I knew a lot of chords, but they weren't the chords that came with the melody that came with the idea I had for the song. Melodies are simple things. If you see a train wreck, there's a melody. If you see a little daisy blowing in the breeze, there's a melody.