Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.
The music that I make is built on layers upon layers of musical ideas. I want to keep it fun and fresh to where listeners won't get everything from just one listen. They can go back to it months, weeks, or even years later and hear something that they didn't ever hear before. That's what it's all about.
I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.
My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.
As a film composer I deal with short bursts of musical ideas that are defined to a large extent by what's happening on the screen, by not only narrative and action, but staying out of the way of dialogue, sound effects.
I had my own musical ideas that Mick helped me with as well.
I did quite a lot of the arranging, fitting different sections together, tempo changes, all sorts of things like that. I actually acted as a bridge between Robert and Ian. Not so much composing, rather presenting musical ideas at each rehearsal.
I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.
