Logic

Logic in music is a concept I've given a lot of thought to over the years. The feeling that it appears like a melody is «meant to be» a certain way. As if it already exists, and you just discover it. You

can get a melodic idea, and if you manage to find the built-in logic of it, you will «understand» the melody, and from that point it's almost as if the song is writing itself. It's almost like you could take a melodic idea that is simple and obvious enough, and give it to almost any capable composer and they should be able to come up with basically the same thing. Because it's so «obvious» how the melody should be.

Some people seem to believe that when you're writing music, you always have an endless set of options available at all times, that you at any point during the composing can pick almost any given note, but that is not the case, at least not the way I work. There are actually very limited possibilities, and the melody itself sets the limitations. The logic leads you in a certain direction, and you just have to follow it, otherwise you're violating some kind of musical law. But that can also make it easier to compose, because the melodic idea «dictates» how you should write. The hardest way for me to compose, is constantly having to invent melodic themes from scratch. That there is no clear logic, and each melodic line is totally unrelated to the previous line and constantly changing without a common denominator. Many of my best melodies have been written in just a few minutes, I did not have to sit for hours working on them. When that happens, I often just put it aside because it's not evident how the melody is «supposed to be.»

The hardest part for me about composing is to get the first, initial idea. When I get it – it may be only a few notes – I then follow the logic and it almost writes itself. Of course there are times when there is no clear logic and you have to be a little more inventive, but for the most part this is the way I work.