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.
There’s two facets to writing a song. There’s you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there’s the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.
So when I wrote ‘Down’ – when I sang the melody, I sung the word ‘Down’ for no reason. I don’t know why. That’s how I came up with the medley. I was like, ‘I don’t know why I said down, but we got to write a song around it.’
If I can sit down at my keyboard and have a melody that says something that I can’t with words, that’s a really beautiful thing.
If I’m proud of one thing in my playing, it’s being able to slow it down and focus on the melody.
In 1973 we moved to the British Isle of Man, and I put my first band together for one year, named Melody Fair.
Once I discovered music and that you don’t need to just use words but can add a growl to the melody, that releases so much more. I never want to make music for any other reason.
Pink Floyd, the most successful progressive rock band of all time, have stood the test of time because the emphasis was always on melody and atmosphere.
With Rage, we wrote riff rock and had rap vocals, so we didn’t really concern ourselves with melody for the most part.
It’s such a weird process, songwriting, because you just have to feel it. There’s no right or wrong melody or lyric.
All my music is very simple in that melody is usually clearly stated.
The human brain is a funny thing: it’s very susceptible to tempo and melody. You put the right words to it, and it becomes very influential.
I love great lyrics, and I love the way it could shape a tune into a very unpredictable one, and I also like taking a great melody and putting lyrics into it.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
When my dad played me ‘Walking Man,’ I heard those chord changes and that melody, it completely blew me away. Maybe you wouldn’t really hear the James Taylor influences in my music, but they’re definitely buried in there.
You’d think, of course, it’s about the melody – that’s a given. But really, I’m no good at singing a song unless it has a good lyric.
I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.
‘Dirt On My Boots’ is a very different song. I heard the melody, and I heard the lyrics, and I heard the drive of that song. I totally related. It was kinda me when I was on my bulldozer working for my dad.
I’ve wanted to do a Christmas song for years but thought every lyric and melody had been written.
As far as the music goes, I like melody.
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
With a good melody… music gets me through everything.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
If you listen to the first, second, and third chorus of a song, they don’t sound the same. It’s the same melody and all that, but what really happens is that the energy changes. It’s all about getting the listener to keep his or her concentration.
A great conductor is an alchemical force: someone who can absorb the historical weight of a famous melody, the expectations of an audience, and the mercurial brilliance of a host of musicians, and shape them all to his or her interpretative ends.
I was a very romantic, overly dramatic young lady, which served me well as a songwriter. Especially as someone who had to focus on lyrics and melody, because if you’re a dramatic and romantic person, lyrics come easy, and you turn every single short-term relationship into the biggest ‘Romeo-and-Juliet’ story ever.
When it comes to ‘Maruvaarthai,’ I have said many a time that Carnatic music drives my creative influence. In that sense, Darbuka Siva gave me a lot of room to breathe with the melody. The instrumental, however, was grounded. The lyrics is just poetic, and phonetically, they sound beautiful.
I take in a lot of different styles when I listen to music, but when I’m actually writing a song it comes from a very stripped back place that focuses on melody and soaring choruses that lift-off.
Melody is pure intuition. I don’t use any thinking brain when I do that. That’s totally in the zone.
Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.
If you’ve got a good melody and a good story married together, that’s a good sign for hit-song material.
I find sadness and strife to be so much more interesting with an upbeat melody.
I found a sound that people really liked – I found this basic concept and all I did was change the lyrics and the melody a little bit. My songs, if you listen to them, they’re quite a lot alike, like Chuck Berry.
I don’t know how to read music. You pick your guitar, you start playing chords and make up a melody that comes out of your head.
When you make a melody that doesn’t come with words from the get-go, sometimes you’re just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it – and it’s really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
I like music that not only has a pop melody to it but is also deeply about something.
My parents and two sisters were great musicians but my family’s approach to music was always way more academic than mine. They were virtuoso players. But they were all impressed that I could sit down at a piano and find a melody. We had a different approach, we had mutual envy.
When I was 17, death metal and extreme hardcore was the best music in the world to me. But as I got older, my palette changed and my thirst for melody and emotion just got bigger and bigger.
It’s always a pleasure when you can compose guitar parts from a strong vocal and not just put the melody on top of guitar riffs.
Stuff like Buena Vista Social Club and Fela Kuti were quite a main thing to my childhood. As soon as I reached an age where I realized that Fela was singing in English, when I got past his accent, I loved the rawness of it, and the funk and the rhythm and the melody.
It’s very rare – and it does happen on occasion – where I’ll take a piece of lyric and I’ll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.
I try to focus on the melodies and try to make everything else minimal. The melody and the lyrics are most important to me.
My voice is my improvisational instrument, the melody instrument. The guitar is harmonic structure. I’m not a good enough guitarist to improvise on it.
I really didn’t like the songs that were being offered to me. There was no melody and no meaning to them. That’s why I have not been singing in Bollywood for a while.
I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you’re left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you’re just left with rhythm.
I think I need the demons in order to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t seem to find a melody.
What I learned about music is that it can have nothing to do with words, instrumentation, image, message, or meaning. The meaning is the melody, the notes, the rhythm – music for the sake of its own beauty, with nothing more required to express itself.
I like rock music that has melody, but it also makes you wanna get up and dance.
I would listen to something on the radio and try to tap out the melody, then the harmonies.
Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody.
The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem’s overall form.
Music critics think of lyrics first and don’t consider melody but so many songs are lyrically depressing but musically great, and that’s why they become classics.
I don’t want to sound like anyone else, I wanted to be in my own creative space and find this river of melody myself.
I’m just a student. I’m learning all the time, and, like anyone, I’m just looking for words I can use and a hummable melody.
I have come to the conclusion – and I don’t know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I’m here now – that a lot of people tell me they don’t get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.
I’m the kind of person who can hear that stuff. If you sing along to the radio and you’re not going to sing unison with the melody, but find the harmony, I find that pretty easy to do.
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.
‘Dirt On My Boots’ is a very different song. I heard the melody, and I heard the lyrics, and I heard the drive of that song. I totally related. It was kinda me when I was on my bulldozer working for my dad.
