Quotes About Commitment

I've realized as well after five years of being on the road that if I'm going to four or five months of my life to something even if I'm overpaid, it's four or five months of my life away from home, away from my son, away from family and friends. I better believe in it on some level even if it's a big movie.

Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.

I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.

It excites me when a person puts their whole self in a song or rhyme, or instrument. It fills me.

We didn't play any Joy Division songs for 10 years after the start of New Order, which was a very honourable thing to do even if it meant shooting ourselves in the foot.

The thing I always default to is that I'll always be here to write songs.

I only record songs that I really like and believe in and can sing with conviction.

You can't give your songs to just anybody.

If I had to drop everything and just be a songwriter, I would be OK with that because that's the real joy.

Obviously I'm not the best singer; obviously I'm not the best piano player or the best songwriter, but I'm doing my best on all of 'em. Once you have all those things in place, then I think everything falls the way it should.

Meeting my wife changed everything; it really, in the long run, made me a much better artist, a much better songwriter, a much better maker of albums.

If you want to be a songwriter, you've got to obsess over it.

I don't take off as many days as most other producers and songwriters, so I'm working every single day, and I do songs every day. So it's just about finding time, scheduling, getting in and cutting the records. I make it happen and that's the name of the game. It's no excuses - you gotta figure it out.

If anyone asks me about songwriting, I guess I'd say that you just gotta do it.

Every riff had to be perfect and heavy, collectively what we wanted it to be. If there was one person in the room who went, 'Heh, I don't think it is there yet, guys,' we'd scrap the whole song. I think that took a little bit of songwriting maturity for us.

We're always writing music no matter what. And we're not always acting - we have months off. But we never take a break from songwriting.

Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I'd force myself to sit down until I came up with something.

Songwriting is my craft now, and it's more than something I just enjoy.

Songwriting isn't a choice. You're either called upon to bear the burden, or you're not. It's not all fun and games.

At the end of the day I'm not just sending beats in. I'm mixing the song. I'm recording the song. I'm engineering the song. I'm in the studio helping with the songwriting. I'm doing the whole beat - every single piece of it is me.

I try and treat songwriting as something that I have to practise every day.

I started songwriting at around age 12, and that was it. I never really stopped. Nothing else ever really crossed my mind. It's truly the expression of who I am.

During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.