Musician Quotes

[musician-quotes]

Do you think that keeping it all internal effects the recording and creation process? As opposed to having this outside person who’s not part of the band playing with the dynamic? Will: There’s positives and negatives. Being in the studio with Chris Walla really brought out other aspects that we didn’t even know we could sound like. He really steered the songs in good directions we may not have known about. It makes you wonder what this album could have been like if we had someone else doing it. I think it was nice for us to just do it ourselves. For some reason it just seemed right for us this time. To just let us express ourselves in our most comfortable environment. I think it was a good decision.

Will Knauer

[musician-quotes]

I guess to see people who are so smart and so fucked up makes me feel better about myself. I take some comfort in these people that are smarter and more fucked up than I am.

J Mascis

[musician-quotes]

This truly is the civil rights issue of our generation. We all look back on when women finally got the right to vote and Civil Rights in the '60s... Can you imagine the time when women couldn’t vote and black people had to use different bathrooms? What the hell was that? Forty years from now, we’ll look back and say “How was it possible that gay people weren’t extended the same rights we are? What the hell was that?"

Ben Gibbard

[musician-quotes]

It reminds us of growing up in the ‘90s when everyone is watching something. For us, we were all watching MTV in the ‘90s, or whatever it was, and to have everyone watch the Superbowl and hear a song they like and all go buy it is how we found out about music when we grew up, and it’s been really special for us to see that magnitude around our music.

Jack Antonoff

[musician-quotes]

Even though the songs are very serious, I feel like they’re very serious, but I think we’ve always tried to have fun music with serious lyrics, depending on how you look at it, it has different meanings for you. At least that’s what I try to do.

Justin Pierre - Talking about the album Go

[musician-quotes]

Cover I did of The Smiths. Please check it out. Sorry about the self promotion. I'm just wanting some feedback. Thanks!

[musician-quotes]

Sometimes I do get writer's block but it's more of a writer's doubt-- I'll try and write but nothing goes anywhere because I start thinking everything sucks. I'm looking forward to doing things more intuitively in the future, just going with whatever happens and not immediately categorizing it as potentially good or bad or original or whatever.

Robin Pecknold

[musician-quotes]

I could get shot for this, but I don't think having a museum in your town makes you better than anyone else. I'm really sick of that attitude. Maybe that's me being ignorant, but we did fine without it. I mean, you can watch movies and read books, and there is music, you've just got to find it. We did it all on our own.

Brandon Flowers

[musician-quotes]

That was the first time we’d been to America. We’d played a show in New York, Bowie came backstage and it was all a bit overwhelming. We’ve got more used to it now and we can hold a conversation. When we meet fans it can be a bit embarrassing though, because when people react to you by screaming you don’t really know how to take it. It’s a bit of an unnatural thing, but I suppose I can understand it. The best trick is to make them laugh, then they can relax a bit.

Matt Helders

[musician-quotes]

We're perfectionists in the sense that we take it seriously and we want everything to be presented properly. We spend ages deciding on the gaps between the songs and how loud the notes are and how the songs relate to each other. The devil's in the detail.

Will Champion

[musician-quotes]

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing. I just like being all over the place and writing whatever comes to mind.

Regina Spektor

[musician-quotes]

We’ve been taught that being cool is to some extent to not do shit about anything. But this record is about destroying society and starting again, and that doesn’t have to be a contrived, elitist notion. People who are good people and lead relatively normal lives can do this on a smaller level just by the choices they make and standing up for themselves and believing in what they do not based on what people tell them, but on what they think of it in their heart.

Max Bemis

[musician-quotes]

I think that my songs (and possibly all songs) are sort of multiple exposures -- and there's nothing dreamier than a multiple exposure! The listener experiences multiple layers simultaneously. The layers include, but are not limited to: my personal experiences and perceptions, my imagination, and the influence of the books, records, works of art, films, and news articles I absorb in everyday life. To me, this is not only natural, this is more or less imperative to the creation of songs.

Jenny Owen Youngs

[musician-quotes]

And the difference between the happy-bubble exterior of our music and the fact that our lyrics tend to be darker is intentional. It reflects who we are, happy people, though by no means are we miserable on the inside. No one's just bubbles all the time.

Ben Thornewill

[musician-quotes]

I think that’s the thing about pop music. It’s a touchingly idiotic, thorough, complete dedication to the dumbest ideas that there are. As people we’re dumb, stumbling idiots—and rock and roll is one of the only art forms that fully cops to that and revels in it.

Will Sheff

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200705/?read=interview_sheff

[musician-quotes]

I've always enjoyed albums that are all over the place—in a good way. And the songwriters I've admired most like Paul Simon, Billy Joel and Tori Amos just have such a range. You can tell that they're capable of writing in all these different styles, and it's just a matter of what they choose to carve out as their identity for any given album. I really like the idea of an album where it can be rock one moment then chamber pop the next, or some songs are intimate while others are really big and epic.

Vienna Teng

[musician-quotes]

It’s really cathartic first of all, it feels really good to sing; it feels really good to yell. You know scream therapy? It’s the same thing with singing.

Tim Baker