#npr interviews

[npr]

Well, you know, a pretty dress is not necessarily a pretty dress, it's the person that's carrying that dress.

Manuel Cuevas, the country music tailor known as ‘the rhinestone Rembrandt,’ told his daughter in Storycorps interview

[nprmusic]

Obviously, drinking gasoline incurs bodily harm on you, but also, being an accessory to that kind of behavior and having to decide — it incurs harm upon you, too. And then, are you responsible for permitting that? If you stay, are you responsible for permitting it? And if you leave, are you responsible for not intervening? If you intervene, are you out of your bounds? Everything about the song is figuring out how you should act in your level of responsibility for your own health and to others in the dynamic of a relationship, which is a difficult lesson to learn.

I feel like I would have put myself into an unfavorable or unhealthy position for this person and maybe recognizing from an outside perspective that that destructivism is a more healthy thing to do than to stay in it for the sort of, romantic, admirable belief that subjecting yourself to this kind of sacrificial, fatuous love would be more of the right thing to do.

-- Julien Baker on her new song, “Funeral Pyre” 

[nprmusic]

I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs...to move someone enough to give me a shot.

Y’all, Bruce Springsteen... on @nprfreshair. Listen. Up. 

[nprmusic]

I was a cheerleader in high school, for example, and I quit because I was not very good at being in a good mood when I needed to be. I'm still a cheerleader in a lot of ways.

Angel Olsen on how getting older changed her emotional approach to performance

[nprmusic]

Songwriting, for me, has always been traumatic.

Gwen Stefani 

[nprmusic]

It sounded like someone ripped a cable from the wall and shocked you in the sternum with it.

Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme on hearing Iggy Pop’s Raw Power for the first time. 

[nprmusic]

I always want to be a pop artist. Not that I want to be Top 40, but in that I always want to be for the populace. I don't want to be elitist. I don't want to deliberately say anything that people wouldn't understand. I think music is supposed to be shared.

@whoismitski on her new album, Puberty 2.

[nprmusic]

You know the way that Nile Rodgers talks about Coltrane, and the way that Coltrane makes him think about jazz? That’s how David Bowie is for me. You meet or see a musician that has something that is of another planet, of another time, and it changes you forever.

-- Lady Gaga on David Bowie and being brave.