Instant Composition Quotes

Songs come to me and I hear them. At least in part, they are very complete; I hear the whole chorus, including the drum pattern, the base, the countermelody, the basic harmonic structure and the main thrust of the lyric.

Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.

I don't really write. I'm an on-the-spot type of person. This beat, let's listen to it; let's vibe. And then I'll do a melody, and then we'll go back and do it.

It takes a lot of people hours to make music because they focus so much on one thing. I just do it, and I make something you can just vibe to.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

I get my most creative sort of energy after a show. So I love to go back to the hotel and compose new material. Generally in a rush, exactly. I have to get it out somehow, otherwise I can't sleep, you know.

There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I'd write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song 'Hurt' in one go at the school studio.

We wrote 'Tush' at a soundcheck in Alabama in about six or eight minutes.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.

I love playing jazz because I love the freedom you have to improvise. It has given me a feeling in my classical repertoire of creating the atmosphere of the here and now.

Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

During those times like in my early years as a writer I could actually write a song in ten minutes because all of a sudden a song is writing itself, I'm just putting down words. It just seem each line that you put down flows with the other ones. It's like writing a love letter you don't think about it, it's something from the heart.

I sit and I write automatically. I don't really try to write. My subconscious mind takes over and writes the songs for me. Songs come very easily for me. When I'm inspired, it takes me 20 minutes to write a song.

I was just fooling around with the piano and Todd [Phillips] was like, 'Hey there's a great spot in the movie [The Hangover] where we need a little bit of a breath in the narrative. You should write a song and stick it in there.' And I was like, 'Well, what should the song be about?' And he said, 'The tiger.' 'Oh, okay.' So I went off and I wrote this song. I came back and Todd and I tinkered with it a little more and then we shot it right then. It all happened in a day.

I just go where the guitar takes me.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

There's a lot of craft in songwriting. The divine inspiration is when the idea comes. It may be a riff. It may be a word. It may be a phrase. It may be a title. Sometimes, in the best of both worlds, that divine inspiration extends through the whole song. I've literally sat down and written a song from beginning to end, almost complete lyrics and everything without ever stopping...in two minutes. The chorus of 'She's Gone' was like that.

Every now and then there might be a beat someone turned down that I have as an unused beat. But everything that predominantly matches the artist in my 30 years of doing this, it was me walking in and sitting there with no drums, no samples, no nothing, and making a beat on the spot.

I know a beat is good for me when I can just start rapping. It's usually hard for me to do that.

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.

And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, 'That's it! Do that again!' In those days we really used to absolutely write like that - both playing into each other's noses.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

Lonnie says it doesn't take long to write a song if you're stricken with a severe case of the Tennysons. He wasn't necessarily talking about a chart-climber.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.