A good comic explores the imagination, but it’s always got to have those notes of truth running through it.
My real name is Chord Overstreet. I actually got my name because my dad is in the music business as a songwriter. I was the third one in my family born, and there are three notes in a chord, so that’s how they came up with my name.
The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer. I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard.
I keep a journal and just kind of take notes. I don’t really so much sit down and write songs – I just take a lot of notes, and sometimes I sit down and put them all together.
I can’t read notes well, but I can hear something and sing a harmony to it automatically.
When a man leaves you notes saying he loves you, or asks how your day was – and then listens – you feel special.
What a fantastic move against black money to ban Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes.
Music is a gestalt. Songs are a life force and they have specific vocabulary to them. You hear a few notes, and they take you into a world of association.
Before getting on ‘The Voice,’ I was very critical and judgmental of people’s vocals. After getting on the show, I was so nervous, I realized my low notes were gone, so nerves do take a big toll on your voice.
For me, travelling and drawing the world, experiencing as much as possible first hand, has been very important. Making notes, drawing and writing on the move, became second nature.
I was shocked when I heard that Farghadani had been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison on spurious charges, as Amnesty International notes, of ‘spreading propaganda against the system,’ ‘insulting members of the parliament through paintings’ and ‘insulting the Supreme Leader’ with her cartoon.
Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.
And, as soon as I could put together the, you know, three or four notes that made up, like, sort of a rock and roll lick, you know, like a Chuck Berry kind of thing, I was off and running. Just completely taken over.
I read a lot of research notes about the countries I visit, and my mum and dad bought me a Kindle, but I’m still getting to grips with it. I prefer paper books.
So much of performing is a mind game. You’re memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.
In the early 60s, you read your essays to your supervisor rather than hand them in. I was both lazy and clever, and realised I didn’t need to write essays at all, I could simply talk with some notes in front of me.
They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies… the medium doesn’t matter, so long as it inspires you.
Recording a Hindi song takes me around 40 minutes whereas a Kannada song takes me about two hours. The music isn’t a problem, since the notes used are universal. The language is the problem. I try my best to get it right, as I’m sensitive about respecting every language, since all of them are sacred in my heart.
My mum sent me to an open audition for ‘Notes On A Scandal’ so I could see quite how many other girls wanted to do this. And I queued up, and I got the job. That was my first-ever audition, and my second was ‘Atonement.’
Sometimes you can just record anything and slow it down hugely and you’ll find all these hidden notes and frequencies that match up really nicely.
It’s very important with these young people who are graduating and getting married to write thank-you notes.
Behind the notes, something different is told, and that’s what the interpreter must find out. He may sit down and play one passage one way and then perhaps exaggerate the next, but, in any event, he must do something with the music. The worst thing is not to do anything.
I painted my pantry door with Rust-Oleum chalkboard paint months ago because I wanted my kitchen to look like a fancy pub. Working from home has made that chalkboard a necessity. Its where I write my grocery lists and recipe notes and daily to-dos.
Most hiring managers interview a lot of people. So many that they generally have to go back to their notes to remember candidates – the exception being candidates with a strong hook. Sometimes these hooks are how people dress or their personality, but the best hook is a strong story that’s work-related.
When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don’t write, or take notes. And I certainly don’t begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
I think throughout the day; there are always lines or certain words, and I’ll just keep notes in my phone. It might just be one or two words, and then that could inspire a whole song, lyrically.
No one has any respect for someone who can play a million notes per minute but can’t put together a decent tune that someone can sing to or feel some sort of emotion from.
I like to have space between the notes. I like to use silence.
For my fragrance, I knew I wanted something sweet but with a different side to it. I have a lot of vanilla notes and bakery shop scents, but then I also have muskier notes that make it a bit edgier. It’s fun but also sophisticated.
When you are making a record and if you spend too much time over it, you have to record it a tone lower or cut the tones lower because you can’t reach some of the notes, I find this. But when you go on stage, you have to put the key up and it really changes the whole thing.
I am stupidly passionate about music; it has become a bit of drug. I buy tons of CDs and spend days listening to each and every one, putting notes on every song to know which tracks are good so that when I do my little MP3 collection, I know which songs to include.
Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it’s 4 A.M.
We are all capable of so much more than the narrow confines of our regular behavior and our personality. So it’s interesting to play different notes on your keyboard.
I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they’re existing characters, I’ll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you’re drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes.
When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.
I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.
Everything repeats itself. There ain’t but so many notes on the scale, there ain’t but so many chord changes, for real, and there ain’t but so many beats. So things come back to you a different way. Don’t matter what they call it.
I look at some young commentators who sit down with piles of notes, and of course, what are you going to do if you’ve spent hours preparing all this stuff? You’re going to bloody well read it out. Boring!
The great leaders are like the best conductors – they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.
I don’t get a lot of writer’s block, because it’s all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days – I mean, some of it ends up being good.
When I play the first few notes of a song and people start screaming, I think: ‘That’s why I did this. That’s why I wrote this song. That’s a good job.’ And it is a job.
I used to come home and play piano all day by ear and make songs up or figure out my favourite Elvis songs. I’d make up games by blindfolding myself and singing the harmony to whatever notes I’d play.
I’m not the fastest drummer in the world, but I’m very into dynamics and knowing that there’s space in between the notes and you got to breathe.
I don’t take notes. I don’t have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.
You have to open the music, so to speak, and see what’s behind the notes because the notes are the same whether it is the music of Bach or someone else.
Vintage is my vocabulary… like the notes of a musician.
Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.
I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.
Though music transcends language, culture and time, and though notes are the same, Indian music is unique because it is evolved, sophisticated and melodies are defined.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.
I wrote ‘Black Deutschland’ very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.
