A Quote by Melina Marchetta

Sometimes Thomas Mackee will stick an earphone into my ear and ask me to listen to a song. When I get over the revulsion of putting something in my ear that's been in his, I sit back and let the music take over, and for a half hour there's something comforting about someone's heart beating at the same rhythm as mine.
There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.
If I'm extra happy or excited, it'll take me an hour or two to write a song. Or, if I'm really sad or something, it will take me about a day. But I have a specific way of writing: I just listen to the beat. I think about what I'm going to write over the beat.
I like to take the time out to listen to the trees, much in the same way that I listen to a sea shell, holding my ear against the rough bark of the trunk, hearing the inner singing of the sap. It's a lovely sound, the beating of the heart of the tree.
But my role is to just apply the skills I've learned over the years: you listen to the guitar, you listen to the vocal melodies, you listen to the rhythm, and you come up with something that helps you take the song somewhere.
I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.
We won't be having an affair." I stare dumbly, certain I just heard an organ in my body crack in my chest. His hands clamp around me, and he crushes me to his body as he slides his nose along the shell of my ear. "When I take you, you'll be mine," he says, a soft promise in my ear.
When I was a kid, we went to St. Augustine, Fla., and I was lying on the couch one night with a Q-tip, cleaning my ear out after I'd taken a shower. I hit my arm on something, jabbed the Q-tip through my ear drum, busted my ear drum and couldn't get back in the water the rest of the time we were there.
He took her in his arms right away. "I'm so sorry," he murmured in her ear. He rocked her, saying it over and over. But no matter how many times he said it, no matter how much she knew he meant it, the words stirred around in her ear but didn't get into her brain. Sometimes he could comfort her. Sometimes he said what she needed, but today he couldn't reach her. Nothing could.
There are records I'll listen to one time and zero in on what's happening, and then I'll listen again to something I didn't notice the first time. The art of making records is something like this: you want to provide a multiplicity of experience in a single object, which is to say you want layers so that people can revisit and have something revealed to them that wasn't apparent the first time. We often will listen to the same music over and over again, and that tells you something, too.
I have an ear monitor to block outside noise when I'm performing. It makes it easier. But sometimes I like to take the ear monitor off and listen to the craziness going on.
You just need the ear. But the ear is something, I guess, that you can't buy. And I can't play the piano fluently, but I feel like my ear is my strong point.
Sometimes it's a bit hard for a person to get the rhythm of music from the ear to the feet, but that's a matter of coordination.
I make up cassettes all the time - to take on the road with me - a song from this album, a song from that album. That's the way I listen to music; it's like one of those K Tel things: it's from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads.
I love music with everything I have, and when I am in a front of a classroom talking about music sometimes someone will ask me a question and it reminds me to really think about something, to really feel something.
I can't force you. I can't make you want to survive this." He pulls me against him and runs his hand over my hair, tucking it behind my ear. His fingers trail down my neck and over my shoulder, and he says, "But you will do it. It doesn't matter if you believe you can or not. You will, because that's who you are.
His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.
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