Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life.
— David Byrne
You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.
The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?
I've got nothing to say most of the time.
People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper.
It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.
Yeah, I like to keep myself interested - I'll kind of throw myself into some area that I don't completely know or understand, that I'm not adept at, so I'm forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There's a good feeling that comes from that.
Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?
People use irony as a defense mechanism.
I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.
From what I've heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.
Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around.
Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.
I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.
So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.
I've never had writer's block.
I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.
Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.
The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.
I don't like begging money from producers.
Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.
Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.
With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.
I love getting out of my comfort zone.
I resent the implication that I'm less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.
I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing.
I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while.
Physical contact is a human necessity.
The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.
It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?
There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.
You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.
I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.
There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.
I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.
I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it's a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.
I've noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I'm not talking about getting a table in a restaurant.
We live in ugly times.
There's more good music being made now than ever before.
We don't make music - it makes us.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do.
Yeah, it's pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.
One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.
Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.
I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.
If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.
We tend to mistake music for the physical object.
Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.
