Conor Oberst Quotes

Well, our songwriting process is pretty collective.

Everything I do is collaborative. It's just my way. I'm really very interested in how the other musicians perceive the song.

There's no one songwriter in the band. It's collaborative, and we all have different tastes.

Even when I'm making my own solo records, I'm collaborating with people. It keeps things interesting for me.

But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.

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.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

Well, I worked with lots of different artists, of course.

I never considered myself a songwriter, but now since I've been working with Nick Lowe, I am contributing to an extent. But I'm the guitarist and he's not, so we compliment each other in a way.

A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.

I really like the thing I did with Martina McBride. I had that song sitting around for a long time.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.

It's a different process for me, but it's really cool to hear someone else singing the song that you wrote.

Music has been more a solitary, creative thing. The acting side of things and working in movies has helped me collaboratively with music in terms of helping me get ideas across to other people and making it more of a team efforts.

The way Beyonce works, the song is a jigsaw piece and then she will piece various elements.

I work on music with different people, and I work on music on my own. That's my life.

Keith Richards has some sort of quote that says 'it takes two people to write a song,' and I'm of that school of thought, too.

So much of inspiration comes from collaboration with other musicians.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

Film is a collection of many mediums and collaboration and you're only as strong as the people you're working with - and everybody owns their mediums.

It was [Kanye West] who spoke, and then we met and recorded some songs. After, you know what it is: we all bump like crazy.

For me it's also - the music is equally as important. I mean I think as somebody who writes music, there just has to sort of be the marriage between both.

I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?