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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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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Being a classical musician, you can go to school for it; you can go get a degree. Even as a composer, there is a certain career path you can follow, but becoming a rock musician is a much more elusive career. How do you learn that or do that?
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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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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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Nobody plans on playing their own songs in front of thousands of people.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
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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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David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
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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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I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.
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I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.
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I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.
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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.