The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I’d say probably in the early ’70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, ‚cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.
Jimmy BuffettI have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.
Taylor SwiftI write music every day.
Lady GagaUsually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.
J. ColeWhen you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.
Frank OceanI cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.
David ByrneI think in the ’70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the ’60s as ‚ideal‘ was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.
David BowieWhen I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
Brian EnoThere’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.
David BowieI like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.
Brian EnoFor me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.
Brian EnoI’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‚ambient music.‘ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
Brian EnoMost game music is based on loops effectively.
Brian EnoAvant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
Brian EnoI always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.
Amy WinehouseMy passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.
Kendrick LamarIn the ’60s and ’70s and early ’80s, the trainers would grind you, and eventually they would break something – they would break an ankle in ways that it would heal. It was just the way of the business, to ensure that you learned respect for wrestling.
Dwayne JohnsonI can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.
George BestI thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.
David BowieNow I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.
David BowieThe way ‚Lux‘ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
Brian EnoIn the ’70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.
David HareI enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
Brian EnoOur goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.
Ruth Bader GinsburgI got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
Brian EnoFrom the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing.
Noam ChomskyI’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.
Anthony HopkinsWhen I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.
Lady GagaI play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.
Lady GagaIt’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.
RihannaI push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.
DrakePrince turned experimental music into pop music. ‚When Doves Cry,‘ the whole ‚Purple Rain‘ soundtrack – he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt ‚House of Balloons‘ was.
The Weeknd‚Royal Beatings‘ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‚The New Yorker‘ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‚The New Yorker‘ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging.
Alice MunroI think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.
David Byrne