Bryce Dessner Quotes
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The danger of a rock band is repeating oneself. It's our greatest fear - that it evolves into the myopia of a semi-successful band that's in love with its own shadow.
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To me, a song like 'Demons' or the title 'Trouble Will Find Me' are acknowledgments that you can't really plan for life, and you can't plan for trouble.
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We've gotten better as a live band. The songs have been allowed to grow with our audience. I don't think I would have done it any other way.
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When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
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As long as I'm still growing as a musician, it keeps me inspired.
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As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
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Early on, I was a performer playing classical music. It's in my DNA in a way that I can't begin to extract it.
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I've always been in rock bands. I was in a rock band with my brother in high school. Then I was playing classical guitar recitals, and people said, 'You know, you can't really do both things.' My intuition told me they were wrong. Somehow, what was interesting about me was that I had those two things in my life.
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David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.
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Nobody plans on playing their own songs in front of thousands of people.
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We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
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For me, the exhausting thing about touring is the sitting around, which is why working on my concert music is really great - and also seeing concerts and seeing friends and, whenever possible, getting out to see a museum.
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Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.
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If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable.
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I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.
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With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.
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If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.
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I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
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Musicians are hungry for new music.
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You don't come to our shows if you want to look cool.
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David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
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The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.
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It's not a hard sell to be asked to do something in Ireland.
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When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.