Johnny Flynn Quotes
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I've always identified as an actor. That's what I set out to do.
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Westminster politics is very unattractive, and people are channelling political energy into more inward questioning - there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it's almost like that's the only safe place to express yourself.
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My dad was an actor, and he always said that work was work; you can't turn your nose up at it. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, and he had this real work ethic, which I inherited.
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If you're trying to do something wholly new, it's hard to fully trust it. But if you use forms that have come before, it lends your music weight and authority. It's also a way to acknowledge that it's not just you who's feeling these things. The emotions are coming through you from a whole history.
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I think everyone in their 30s looks back at their 20s and thinks, 'Oh God, if I'd just done this and this, and not done that.'
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My dad was an actor, and he made it all seem quite magical. It felt like a slightly subversive thing, telling stories, when all of my other friends' parents were builders or bank clerks. It's always seemed quite magical to me.
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I think the two are kind of synonymous for me; songwriting is like my form of diary making. It's how I process the world. Without doing that, I feel kind of lost. The characters that I play often come out in the songs and the challenges that they face, albeit in an abstract way.
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The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away.
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I had a series of jobs in the small fishing village in West Wales where my family lived when I was a teenager. I worked as a fisherman in the day, and then the skipper and his wife ran a small restaurant - she'd cook the fish he caught.
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I like getting older. I always looked younger than I was, and I found that people wouldn't give me the room to speak. The older I get, it's like, 'Oh, I'm still talking, and they're still listening.'
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I just said, casually, 'You know, I passed up on auditioning for Einstein.' And my friend was like, 'You idiot, you have to do it!' She made me do it. I sent the tapes off assuming that somebody would say, 'Ha ha, very funny.'
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I'm not a funny person.
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Diane Cluck is part of the anti-folk movement in New York. She's got a really haunting voice, and she usually sings in the pentatonic scale.
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My thing about demos is that you usually prefer them to the finished thing.
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I've never done anything like 'Brotherhood' before. It was a great challenge to take up a part in a live audience sitcom - it was amazing.
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I'm not a fan of taking too long in the studio. I always do one vocal take and jump out of the control room, and people push me back in... It's a real turn-off to hear things that are too polished. I feel like I've almost fought for the right to be that kind of musician - we used to be on a major label, and now we're on an indie.
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The truth is there's always a hum of people playing folk music in cities.
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I'm not really interested in myself in my writing. I can't see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.
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I actually do bits of my writing in sort of incidental spaces - when I'm traveling on the Tube or on a bus. More often than not, it's a reaction to how you feel about something, and if you're sitting down and concentrating on, 'I must write something,' then you can't have a truthful reaction.
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We all have these shades in our nature: it's a spectrum within all of us.
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Weirdly, my dad didn't want me to become an actor, he was always quite resistant to it. He told me as much many times. That just made it more attractive to me.
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You might as well acknowledge what came before, because you can never do something wholly new. It's not unoriginal to make your references clear.
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I always love going to New York.
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I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.