A Quote by Danny Elfman
The first thing I do is lay out that melody and figure out how it has to hold here and then finish to land here, because you know in advance you're going to want the melody to catch four things in the action.
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I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I'll be in the shower, and I'll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I'll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.
Melody always comes to me first before words - cadence and melody. When you're humming the melody and it's incredible and words start coming out it can build into something special.
Melody is the first thing that comes to me when I'm songwriting. I learned piano classically first, and then I went into soul, and so melody has always been the first. It's so important.
If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.
Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.
When I first came to London I thought there'd be this amazing music scene, but I was quite let down by how little was going on and how few ideas there were in music. Bands were writing songs that had no melody, and I wondered, why is that, melody is the most important thing in a song. It's the thing that sticks in your head.
When I start to write a song, I have the words and I have the melody, and then it's just a matter of making it to the end. I think if I have something that I could identify as a talent, it would be that I can finish a song. I kind of know intuitively where the melody should go.
There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.
When I write a song, I get the melody right first, and then hopefully I can back it up with a lyric that has to respect the melody.
I think the melody is the first time I hear in a song and if I like the melody, then I'll pay closer attention to the lyrics.
I write lyrics really fast. When it's time to write, I usually put them off until the very end and then when it's time to write I can just sit down: I sing the melody, whatever the melody is, because that's the first thing that's already been there for a long time; I start singing it and I start creating consonants and vowels; then they turn into words; then all of the sudden one sentence will happen; then that sentence will dictate how the rest of the sentences happen.
Melodies can be good depending on the context. You can have a simple melody, and if the harmony behind it is interesting, it can make a very simple melody really different. You can also have a complex melody. The more complex it is, the harder it is to sing, and then sometimes it can sound contrived. You could write a melody that would be fine on a saxophone but if you give it to a singer, it can sound raunchy.
I like to get a vibe first, then a melody and really beat up the melody for a while, then try and find a lyric that really suits him/her.
I'll just start laying out the melody exactly where I want it to fall. And then I'll go back and fill it out. Whereas, in other pieces I'm really just going a couple bars at a time.
Usually it's lyric first, but sometimes it's melody. And I carry a hand-held recorder everywhere I go so I can just hum or whistle a melody if one hits me. Sometimes it's both simultaneously - lyric and melody at the same time - those are a little confusing to me, but sometimes it comes in that form. I just feel like I have my own little radio station and sometimes the static clears and something beams in from out there.
I'm a very melody-driven writer and I have a rule that I don't write anything down because if I can't remember the melody than it wasn't worth remembering. So it's my way to test myself in the studio. When I was a kid I could sing pretty well so melody always made a lot of sense to me.
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