LP Quotes

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.

I hate the whole 'record your album, do your promo campaign, have a year off to write another album' pattern. As an artist, you should keep creating as much as you possibly can.

We've written something like 900 songs in all.

I never stopped recording, but I went through a period where... The one thing that a lot of people don't know is that for as long as I've been as artist, I've been a writer and a producer.

We should be able to write songs for a new album every six months. If you think about it, it's not a crazy amount of writing.

We write constantly. It's nice to have more to pick from and we pitch songs to other artists, so it's not always songs for us.

I kind of tend to write a lot of songs, so it's never too hard for me to finish an album; it's more about just getting enough songs that I really love.

I must have 300 songs unreleased or unrecorded, lying around. I'm a production machine, it never stops.

I hate to debunk the myth - kids don't wanna hear it - but as songwriters, you have to polish your craft a little bit and hone it as much as possible.

It's pretty funny to me when I hear people say, 'I write six songs every day,' or, 'I turn out a song a day.' I bet you that's a whole week of bad songs.

When we first signed to Loud, we had a 20-song demo. So all of those songs we wanted to put on the album. But we started making new ones, and through process of elimination, we wanted all the new ones. We didn't like the old ones no more.

When I first started writing songs, I never intended on singing. I didn't really consider myself a singer at all. I was just kind of recording the demo vocals as a holding place until someone else came and sang.

A lot of new artists sign their deal and then go into a development stage for a year or two or sometimes never get out of it. For me, because I had been a working songwriter in town, I had a collection of songs that I was ready to make into an album. At the time, I didn't realize it was becoming an album, but it was.

When I first started making music, I wrote the lyrics first, but now, because the music has got kind of wilder, I've flipped it.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

People think that the big companies make songs and their artists just release it. It's not like that.

I think writing and singing go together, but I treat them as two separate careers because I write for others. If I'm writing for myself, I prefer to be with the producer. And then we can vibe out and throw ideas back and forth, and I'll basically let the producer play me a bunch of beats until I vibe with one.

The music comes first. Final lyrics are usually written very close to recording the vocals.

There are a lot of classic Goapele tracks that are obviously me. And I'm also just trying to keep evolving and grow as an artist. I've always had a wish list of producers I wanted to work with. I just wait until the feeling is mutual and go into the studio to see what we can come up with.

I write all the time, and I write a lot of songs, but before I started putting out records, those songs always just ended up on stuff that I did with The Babies.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.

I don't ever go and write music for an album. That's not something I do. I don't go and write music for an audience or a career; I don't do that at all. I write basically all the time. I'm addicted to it.

I have, like, 'Finders Keepers' fever now! Sometimes I go in the studio, and I'm like, 'That worked so well, and I wrote it in 45 minutes, so if I try wearing the same outfit and playing on the same piano, it'll happen again.'