J. Tillman Quotes
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My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.
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I was kind of bored playing drums in a band. Which was depressing, because playing in the band was kind of a golden ticket.
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There's a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.
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I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.
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It's a vanity to think that a legitimate shamanistic experience can be purchased.
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Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.
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I had this revelation, you are a lot better at the between-song stuff than you are at the song stuff. That was devastating. And I usually find devastating things to be pretty valuable.
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I play sad bastard music. For the money.
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When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn't want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off.
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I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it's completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.
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I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.
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I was like, 'Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.'
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I think that providing obstructions in the live setting is when you get something that actually means something, as opposed to just aping your way through your greatest hits.
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Laurel Canyon is kind of grotesque. It's this nature-themed place, and everybody is kind of angry.
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I've never taken the steps to be 'successful': I've never had a manager or signed to a publishing house.
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My humor is my creativity, and my skepticism is a gift.
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Christian music was music that I grew up listening to that I can't say has had much of an impact on anything I have done in my adult life. Maybe Christianity has, but certainly not the bullshit Christian music I was listening to when I was 12. To me there's not much substance in that music. I don't have a message or anything.
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With sad music, or music that's perceived as sad, there's a sense of solidarity that can be really powerful. My songs are all joyful to me.
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You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.
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I guess with the way that I've conducted myself I'm in the logical spot and I'm fine with that. Even my limited interactions with success have left me confused and bummed out, so I don't think the two can co-exist.
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I don't feel any obligation to make my intentions for a song accessible to a listener or an audience. I'm not interested in conveying anything to them so much as what's best for me.
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I like the freedom of being able to just use the live show as an opportunity to more so deconstruct what's going on in the album than to recreate it.
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I don't think that just because a lot of my music has a quieter aesthetic; [it] excludes me from achieving that in a live setting, from being dangerous or something.