I got a phone message from Janet Jackson saying, 'Hi, I love 'Losing My Edge', can you do me something funky and dirty like that?' I can't really do off-the-peg stuff, so I never called back.
— James Murphy
I always wished I had a more flamboyant streak, but it's just not what I'm made of.
I wouldn't say I'm a friend of David Byrne, but I guess I'm an acquaintance. I'm obviously an admirer, and we've met, but we don't call and chat about 'Breaking Bad' or anything.
The plan is to keep on putting out records until someone shows up and tells us to stop.
If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.
I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I got really aggressive about it and became more of a weird kid.
LCD live was set up to be an argument about what's wrong with bands and why bands should be better. I always thought that we were so obviously not a great band, comically not a great band. I was not a great front man.
The more you are like me, the less interested in my band you are.
There's kind of a limitless amount of things I want to do, and when the path seems to open, that's when I try to do a thing.
I was into punk rock my whole life. I never listened to the Eagles. I never listened to things that were getting Grammys. So getting a Grammy nomination wasn't bad, it just wasn't meaningful.
One of the big things that broke the band up for me, which I've become much clearer on over the years, was that I had no desire to be famous.
What we are as a live band is different to what we are on recordings, but they're both equal versions: they're both LCD Soundsystem, but in very different ways.
Restaurants remind me of bands: there's lots of camaraderie, people work very closely together, very hard, and it's a bad job to pick if you want to make lots of money. Whether music or food, the reward always has to be because you love it.
I started playing in my first band when I was 12. I like to date myself by saying I was in a New Age band when it wasn't ironic; it was actually called new wave because it was new.
To do a band properly does kind of mean you don't really get to do anything else.
Even in the band I was in when I was a kid, I'd be telling everyone what to do. I'd be leaning over the drums, telling them to tune their guitars, micromanaging.
I was a singing guitar player as a kid, and I found it really embarrassing, so I stopped singing and became a drummer.
For most of my life, making music has cost me money. So I learned to live very, very cheaply.
I was always just blown away by David Bowie and how mannered the guy was willing to be. It was so far from what I imagined someone with my confidence to be capable of.
One of the things that I think is special about DJing is creating this atmosphere of collectiveness, as if to say, 'We're all in this together.'
Making people dance has another function that has nothing to do with art, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. It's like food - if you're not eating it, you're doing something wrong. If they're not dancing, something is wrong.
I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie, and I was talking about getting the band back together. He said, 'Does it make you uncomfortable?' I said 'Yeah,', and he said, 'Good. It should. You should be uncomfortable.'
I have a thing about inane lyrics - the world doesn't need them.
LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music.
I'm a DJ, and I live in Williamsburg, and I run an independent record company.
I don't prepare very well. I'm always sort of wrapped up in what I'm supposed to be doing in the moment, and then I suddenly appear someplace, and I'm really not prepared.
I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.
My gut instincts are strong, but they're not always accessible to me, which is why I like DJing, because you don't have time, and you have to go on instinct.
I never did albums fully at DFA; I always would go someplace else so I wasn't making a record in my office, basically.
If being in a band was my job, then I would quit. This is not a good job. A good job is in financial management.
My high-techness is pretty low-tech. I'm not wildly computer savvy. I'm a record person.
I love rock. I love the music that was born out of the latter part of the 20th century. It means a lot to me.
I have a very toxic combination of being completely determined, inflexible, controlling and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone's feelings, hypersensitive to other people's needs - and it's just paralysing.
I'm an underdog by nature, and I like to be fighting. I don't make music for myself. I make music to fight.
I moved to New York in 1989 and went to study at NYU.
Those early years in New Jersey were amazing. We lived in a really small town with tons of kids my age. There were fields and woods and a creek - it was a pretty ideal place to be a little kid.
When I do a remix, I try to think about what I don't have in my bag and create something to fill that gap.
Punk rock, to me, was always outsiderness. When I first saw large-group-scene punk rock, I was repelled by it, because there were way too many people who agreed with each other.
I've always been a good imitator. I love music. But I'm just not that original.
I'm basically a schlub.
I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool, I can't control that.
If I opened a record store, it wouldn't be all punk rock and esoterica.
I'm always surprised by how optimistic and open sometimes people who are very successful are.
The vast majority of kids in my school went on to college. That's just what you did. And I remember feeling like, 'No, I'm not doing that.' The idea that college was next, that it was a given, meant it was of no interest to me. So I didn't go.
Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.
I don't drink beer, and I don't drink at home.
We didn't set out to be cool. We set out to be an extremely tight band. We wanted to defy expectations. The more negative your mindset on coming to one of our gigs, the better for us, frankly.
I'm not a big songwriter guy. People who are really good singer-songwriters usually left me kind of cold.
As things mature - whether they be real estate, rock n' roll, politics, festivals, radio - there's an efficiency that develops, and with it, very often, comes some soul-crushing truths.
I was someone who grew up obsessed with bands, how they were and how they treated one another, and how they treated fans.
