First I find a riff and a chord sequence. And if that's any good, then I start to play it with some other guys and pump it up. If that's great, then I check the attitude and the atmosphere of the track. What the hell is this putting out? There's no point in writing songs on a sheet of paper, going verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and regarding this as a song. No, it ain't. A song is music, and I'd rather start with the music and then get into the attitude of the track and put something on top of it. What are you going to put on top of it, because you could have spent months trying? I can't divorce lyrics from the music. Songwriting is a marrying of the both. To me, the easiest way is to get the track.
- Keith Richards, 1992
That's how most of my songs come together. I can't walk in the studio with a song typed out on a piece of paper and say, THIS is it, THIS is how it goes, play it. If that's what I wanted, I might as well hire session men. I just go in there with a germ of an idea, the smaller the germ the better, and GIVE it to them, FEED it to them, and see what happens. Then it comes out as a Rolling Stones record instead of me telling everybody what I want them to play. The band can work it any way they want. If it works, great. If it doesn't, I know I can go in there the next night with another germ. I know I'll grab them some way, infect them somehow. If it's good, then Mick and I can finish it off.
- Keith Richards, 1975
Sometimes we run things down... sometimes we get an idea for a song from, say, a rhythm that Charlie and Keith have played together or something... Quite often, we go into it without the song being written - which annoys me intensely. But, that's the way we record sometimes. It like it to be rehearsed before we go in, but it never really is. The music quite often comes ahead of the words. That annoys me. It's very hard to write lyrics to the track. It's much easier to have it done before but... I always try to write the lyrics to the songs.
- Mick Jagger, 1971
(Most of the time) there's an idea first from one person. You don't really sit down and say, Okay, neither of us have an idea. We usually say, Well, what do you think of this, or you go out and play something and someone else joins in: Oh, I like that or How does it go or Can you show me the chords to that? You don't REALLY sit down and say, Oh, this is starting from totally scratch - you know, having NOTHING. There's always somebody who has something.
- Mick Jagger, 1994
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http://www.timeisonourside.com/songwriting.html)
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Keith Richards, "LIFE":
So we're the song factory. We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in this respect at the time. …
And because you've been playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day, ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you're thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell's going on. You might be getting shot at, and you'll still be 'Oh! That's the bridge!' And there's nothing you can do; you don't realize it's happening. It's totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, 'I just can't stand you anymore'... That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can't believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters!
