Stephen Malkmus Quotes
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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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Lyrics are back, maybe. It seems like there was a bit of an attitude that lyrics are not important.
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I like that band Get Hustle. They're cool live. I haven't heard their records, though.
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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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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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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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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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I'm thinking, I'm singing like Ozzy Osbourne, but I don't sound like him enough, ever.
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You know, the songs that are self-conscious or jerky, they are that way, but the other ones aren't, so that's a good thing. Some of the songs are Beck-jokey, but the others, they have heart in them.
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The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Basically, no one else gives me any opinions on lyrics. I don't ask for them. If they did, I would listen.
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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 thought The Doors were the greatest band for a while.
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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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When a band means a lot to you, you build the fantasy more than the reality. Always.