Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.
We stuck the record head so it kept on recording over and over on top of itself and played keyboard notes into it to create this ghost repetition melody.
In my songs, I'm not saying something that's never been said before. The have lyrics aren't going to blow people away. It's the emotion and the melody that drive it home.
I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.
At times I have a beat first and then I write. Sometimes I have a melody in my head and I pick up the guitar to develop the song. Other times I just write without any melodies, and I end up using those lyrics when I think I have the appropriate instrumental that would bring out and depict the emotions of what I have written.
I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.
'Appetite for Destruction' was the only thing written with lyrics and melody fitting the guitar parts at the same time. After that, I got a barrage of guitar songs that I was supposed to put words to, and I don't know if that was the best thing for Guns.
You know when a song has a melody or some kind of element that affects you, and that is what I am trying to go for.
In Hungary all native music, in its origin, is divided naturally into melody destined for song or melody for the dance.
After playing now for 60 years, it's still very challenging for me to play a simple melody and have it clean and touch the reed at the proper time in the proper way.
The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn't make it easy.
The musicians recommend that I sing a sing the way it is written the first time and then start to look for other notes that aren't in the melody.
But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story.
I think the B-52's were a huge influence on Sleater-Kinney. The way that there'd be a really interesting guitar line that'd be really melodic and kind of simplistic, I really related to that. The sense of melody is really intense and fun. It's not just traditional song structures, but it's very melodic and draws you in, in kind of an immediate way.
The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures - particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.
Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs.
I'll have the music, and then I'll just turn the microphone on, press Play and Record and sing. And whatever comes out ends up being the melody.
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
We started very slow in America. It was small acoustic shows. We played places like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago and everywhere there has been a great reaction. It has been really lovely. They listen to the lyrics and the melody over there and the reaction has been fantastic.
Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.
I still have a passion for the music, which is such a beautiful thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night out of a dream and have a melody in my head, and run to my piano.
Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?
As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I'll fit whatever I'm trying to say around a melody.
Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.
We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.
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.
My mother came from St. Thomas. I heard that melody and all I did was actually adapt it. I made my adaptation of sort of an island traditional melody. It did become sort of my trademark tune.
Country is bringing in a little rock element... a little '80s element. Melody is king now. But its just in the music, its not so much in the songwriting, which is still very basic to the storytelling aspect of it.
Reggae, oh man. It's the ultimate music. The positivity. The musicality. The whole cultural expressionism of it. The danceability. Just the cool factor. The melody factor. Some of it comes from a religious place. If there were a competition of who makes the best religious music, it would definitely be the Rastafarian reggae.
I really believe in melody.
The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody.
A good idea for lyrics and a melody to expand on.
Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.
