James Murphy Quotes
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I write songs all the time. Sometimes they're just weird songs I sing while changing a baby, or songs about annoying things that I sing to myself, or to friends while sitting at a bar, or about Christmas or New York.
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Titles are relatively arbitrary to me; they take on meanings that aren't really my meanings. 'Sound Of Silver' was just, like, I made the studio silver, and I wanted the record to sound 'more silver.'
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You can't be afraid to embarrass yourself sometimes.
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I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool, I can't control that.
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In my experience, people looking for progress aren't actually looking to move things forward. They're looking to be perceived in a certain way: as a forward thinker. It's about vanity rather than any altruistic motives for the art.
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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.
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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.'
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To me, the band is like one of my homes, in fact. It's not like, 'I've got to get out of this band. I've got to go home.' This band is home in a lot of ways. It's my closest friends; it's a place where I really feel comfortable and happy.
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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.
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Making 'Sound of Silver' was very emotional at times, where I just hated making that record.
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The more you are like me, the less interested in my band you are.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not a big songwriter guy. People who are really good singer-songwriters usually left me kind of cold.
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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.'
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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.
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I don't see myself as necessarily a very creative person. I'm a technical guy.
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When given the opportunity to fail myself or fail someone else, I choose to fail myself.
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Songs are songs, and to reduce them is to waste them.
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I'm generally a very optimistic guy.
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There's a difference between a cheap lie and a beautiful lie.
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Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.
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I have a thing about inane lyrics - the world doesn't need them.
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I've been to Manchester enough to know it's a real place. It's not Factory Records and the Smiths bicycling around. I get it. It's a modern city.