Instrumental Arrangement Quotes

There's a couple of fills on the 'Head Job' album. The title track sounds huge, I love it, and there's a few fills in there.

A great solo does not make a great piece. Rather, a great solo in a great song - that's what makes a 10 out of 10. It's the combination of emotional feel and inventive ideas.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.

I always enjoyed singing; I played guitar.

Stevie didn't use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don't use my work to further the tools.

There is one live track on the album, 'Einsamaller,' and that had a conductor - Eyvind Kang.

There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.

Nothing beats 2 guitars, drum and bass.

I'd say writing songs is, for me, as much playing the tape recorder as it is playing guitar or writing words.

I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.

Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

One of my favourite Donald Byrd tracks is 'Think Twice,' and I didn't want to sample it. I've always enjoyed when other people have sampled it, so I wanted to instead of making a beat with it or something like that, or freak the beat of whatever. I wanted to just recreate it in my own way, like how I heard it.

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

'Back In The Saddle' - I never realised what a good riff that was, or at least how much it satisfied me. And when we play it live, it comes across much better than I ever expected it to.

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

We recorded several of Kenny's songs in the living room of my home.

I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.

I'm coming into places with some people who just want to hear what I did before, with some people who want to hear me with a band, but I am just at the moment sticking to my guns and saying, 'You know what? I want you just to hear this for a minute. I want it to be in the context of me and a guitar.'

I have a good time doing 'Give Me Back My Man.' Keith Strickland can really fly on the guitar.

For 'The Anthem,' a lot of my fans were like 'Oh, man, he's getting lazy making just, like, a pop format tune that everyone's doing these days.' But on this album, I wanted to write songs with vocals that would get stuck in my head, not just movements of instrumentals.

I usually write lyrics first, and then when I get home or close to any kind of instrument, I usually make a melody for those lyrics.

But Contra la Puerta was done mostly in the opposite way, starting with sounds and melodies.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don't write drum riffs first.