Benji Madden Quotes

What I do as a songwriter is a constant force in my life, that I'm grateful to have.

I've written songs everywhere, and I think the place does matter.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I've written a whole song in an hour.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.

My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I just want to write a great lyric and write a great song, and everything else is icing on the cake.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

I usually sit around with the guitar in reach and grab it when I get an idea. Sometimes it lasts five minutes, and sometimes it lasts all day.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

Every day you can write a song but some days there is just some magic in the air and something special about the catch; other days you write all day on a song line or idea.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.