Ryan Adams Quotes
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I've gotten to a place where I still love to play and sing, but I don't have any ego agenda left, outside of just wanting to stay in a creative place and play music. I much prefer to sing for somebody else, and to somebody else.
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Do you remember stormy winter?Well button up your coat, one's comin' soon
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For any producer I've ever worked with, their toughest job is to convince me to not to obscure my vocals. A lot of people don't like the sound of their own voice on, like, cassette tape or something. It's like that for me, and other songwriters I know. Like, "Oh God, that's what I sound like?"
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Caitlin Cary and I were always talking about X when we talked about whiskeytown, before it became an actual band. We like the concept of there being no real front person in X, yet this kind of switch up of vocals and really their sheer power, and their ability to sort of bastardise punk rock and midwetsren rock and even country into their own sound.
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It's hard to be bipolar and bicoastal at the same time.
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Sometimes an idea from six years ago will come to me out of the blue. And maybe I haven't even seen the lyrics I wrote down, but I'll just have this physical memory of having written it, and in my mind I can see the piece of paper, and the words I wrote down, and then by muscle memory, I'll remember the chords that go along with it.
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There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.
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On Heartbreaker, I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs.
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I got on the phone with the president of my label and I said, "Obviously, I write songs in a lot of styles and play a lot of different kinds of music. We're getting toward the end of our business collaboration. If you could envision a record that you wanted to hear from me, what kind of record would it be?" It wasn't like asking him to fill an order, it was really just a conversation. For all the things I'd ever asked him, this was one thing I'd never asked, and I don't know why. So I was curious. And the thing that he was most interested in hearing was a solo record.
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I have found in black metal the lyrics are profoundly beautiful... a pathos and mythos at the same time.
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The weirdest thing I've been fascinated with nowadays is the new contemporary country music, which to me sounds like very strange '70s pop, and sometimes like rock music. But some of the themes in there - maybe it's because I know how the songs were written, but it really does sound like it was written by two or three people, with the idea to appeal to the most general audience.
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There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.
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The good thing about playing the guitar: You can take on different kinds of music. I'm always doing something different from the last thing I did because I have the shortest attention span on earth.
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You could eat sushi off my bookshelf. My cleaning regime is like a battleground. I'm Genghis Khan and my cleaning products are my Mongolian army and I take no prisoners. The rest of my life is an experiment in chaos so I like to keep my flat neat.
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I'm a pretty bad troubadour. I'm more of a music fan who got away with making records.
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I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation.
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This is going to sound crazy, but I can hear music in my head. I can imagine a piano or a guitar playing, and I can sort of think out.
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I was never much of a bass player.
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It would be really nice to make a record that would be super-fun to play live - a record that would be funny, with a little bit of heart.
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Forever only takes its toll on some
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I think it would be wrong to consider 'Ashes and Fire' a love album. The record is obsessed with time. I believe that there is a kinder view of the self on this record.
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There definitely isn't a structure anymore to how I get ideas. A lot of times I'll just write down a phrase, or I'll have an idea that's attached to just a few chords. Other times, it's work.
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The process of making music is more interesting to me than the end result. If I was a cook, I'd be more interested in cooking food than eating food.
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Maybe I am a jerk sometimes. Maybe I'm not. I think most people are kind of a jerk once in a while.