James Murphy Quotes
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When I was a kid, when the Walkman came out, I was sold. I listened to music 24 hours a day.
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I think that not being all that overwhelmed by good reviews is a luxury. I'm like a rich person who says he doesn't care about money.
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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.
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It's strangely energizing to have people who don't make music themselves take potshots at you from the Internet.
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The Fall was super powerful to me because of their covers. They were intimidating. I bought 'This Nation's Saving Grace' when it came out in 1985, and there was something about it that made me nervous. It terrified me.
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To do a band properly does kind of mean you don't really get to do anything else.
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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.
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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.
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Warhol had resonance because it was high art and low art. And you could argue about it endlessly.
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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.
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For most of my life, making music has cost me money. So I learned to live very, very cheaply.
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If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.
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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.
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I was someone who grew up obsessed with bands, how they were and how they treated one another, and how they treated fans.
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I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.
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I have an interest in everything, but I don't have an interest in starting new careers.
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My high-techness is pretty low-tech. I'm not wildly computer savvy. I'm a record person.
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Subway Symphony is a little idea I had to change the sound of the subway turnstiles into different pieces of music, depending on what station you're entering.
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When Andy Kaufman performed, he was not just trying to be funny. He was playing with the notion of what it means to try to be funny, of what it means to be an audience expecting somebody to be funny. He was doing a dance and playing a game.
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Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.
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A lot of the time, you compromise., which is fine - it's part of not being totally insane.
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I miss producing. I hate it when I do it, but I love it.
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My personality is based on an anonymity and failure. Failure and anonymity, those are my strengths - superiority from below.
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I never did albums fully at DFA; I always would go someplace else so I wasn't making a record in my office, basically.