Stephen Malkmus Quotes
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There's something in life that's cool, it's relatively cheap, and fun, and populist. Even when it's elitist.
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I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.
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The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.
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Don't go to the same studio twice, or work with the same engineer twice.
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Things tends to often consolidate like Disney. It's the same with music. There's Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and Patti Smith. There's these three people that everyone seems to agree on. No matter what they like, they seem to like those three.
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We care if people like what we did. If you're just making records for yourself, why put them out and do all these interviews and do touring? I'm a huge music fan, and this is what I do with my artistic time. It's all I really do, except hang out with my family. I value human relationships, and it's a way for me to interact with the world and feel like I'm part of something.
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So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics."
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Family is the best. I can honestly say, it's a gift that is beyond making art. I didn't know that when I got into it.
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Lou Reed is something like a personal favorite of mine, but you could always put me into that drawer of singers who can't really sing, who speak their songs.
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My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
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We're probably a couple of freaks who've created their own little universe, are living in our own little world and that's the only place where we can survive.
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I don't know if you look back on your life and just see successes, but probably the first things that pop up are the regrets.
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Most people want to be seen or heard. You want to shine. That's my way of shining.
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If a voice is just too nice, without an edge, it kinda all flows by. You forget it. You don't listen to the lyrics.
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I've wanted to not play as much. I would like to just sing now. Even though I don't think I'm a great singer, I wouldn't mind just - not being a frontman, per se, but singing and not playing.
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When I was in high school, I was a late bloomer. And just like all those supermodels who said they were gawky and no one liked them, that was me - metaphorically. And so I was ready to rise like a phoenix in later times.
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I thought The Doors were the greatest band for a while.
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There's no point that an album should sound like a watered down version of another album.
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You don't realize that when you're young, and you're surprised there's a lot of people at your gig - you just think it's general British-press hype.
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We're not on a desperate mission to write chart compatible stuff.
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It's normally in the morning, just playing around. And I'm not saying everything I make is great, but that's what I do. I can't even remember how I wrote stuff.
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I'm thinking, I'm singing like Ozzy Osbourne, but I don't sound like him enough, ever.
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I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
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I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.