All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.
I tend to think about so many different things on a recording. I'll be trying to tune into what the drummer's doing, trying to keep everyone playing the groove and other things like making sure the piano's in a nice pocket.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.
My father was a great admirer of music and the arts, so there was always a lot of culture in the house. As it happened, while my father was the ambassador in Portugal, the ambassador's residence had a piano, and so I started learning how to play it at the age of five.
Sometimes, I make music in my sleep. So I get up, put on my headphones, and compose it on the piano.
Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.
Everything that has a spare piano is 'like Satie' and everything with strings is 'filmic,' Sometimes I get annoyed when they say my stuff sounds 'like Satie'. No, it doesn't. At least, I don't think so.