Quotes About Innovation

You always want to be innovating and creating what's next. Versatility is also really important for a producer.

Me jumping on a song with Ariana Grande is just showing versatility, you know what I'm saying?

Versatility is the key today. We have a smart audience today; if you keep doing same stuff, nobody is going to watch you.

I'm big on showing people versatility. I'm constantly trying to push myself to break barriers and the idea that we have to stay in one lane.

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

Sometimes I'll have sections that I'm not quite sure how they fit in the puzzle of a tune, they'll get moved around; what I think was originally a verse ends up becoming the chorus, or what's an intro gets dropped as a hook, things get shifted around a lot.

The turnaround is when you have a solo in betwixt the verses. You stoppin' to have a solo.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.

I like the sounds of EDM; the guys create new sounds, beautiful sounds. The melodies, it's a little less. I like the kind of melodies I did with Donna Summer, or 'Flashdance,' where you have a verse, a chorus - a song setup.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

One of my main problems with music is that the basic formula is always the same: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, chorus, chorus, end. One of the bands that changed that was The Beatles. If you listen to 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.' It's three verses, bridge, end.

I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.

Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.

I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.

Tra-la-las and doo-be-do's became a Neil Sedaka trademark. I was the king of the tra-la-las and doo-be-do's in the '50s and '60s. But then when I re-recorded 'Breaking Up,' I started with a verse instead of the doo-be-do's!

Sometimes I write from the end of the verse to the beginning of the verse.

I've always been a big fan of taking old songs and completely turning them on their head. Having no adherence to the fine tradition of the original version. Rearranging them and taking a different approach to them.

The original version of 'Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang' was made to a Boz Scaggs song; I can't remember the name of the song.

When I lived in Greece and off the coast of Italy, I enjoyed a branzino dish so much that I created my own version.

'I Want To Hold Your Hand' is a great classic by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, I sure love that song. I did like the classic version, a rock-oriented song, then someone heard me do it with the Grant Green approach - Grant Green and Larry Young did it, with a bossa nova beat on the funky side.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn't even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

I like to blur the line between remix and cover version and new song.