Bradford Cox Quotes
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You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste.
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I'm obsessed with five different things a day. It's like lightbulbs in a Christmas light chain.
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I don't like the sound of my own voice. And, for people I don't know, their impression of me is what they read on the internet, and they're so far off a lot of the time. I think people are intimidated by me, and I don't know why. Sometimes even my own bandmates can be intimidated, or irritated, by me. I come across as arrogant somehow. In reality, I've probably got the lowest self-esteem of anybody I know, which has really been rubbed in my face lately in personal situations.
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For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.
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When I go on a nostalgia trip it's not aesthetic. For me it's about trying to recapture the smell or the feeling of something that I've experienced in the past personally.
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Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music.
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I am asexual. A-sexual. I read somewhere, maybe on Facebook, where somebody said something like, "I heard Bradford was gay, but then I heard he was bi." Then somebody wrote, "No, I heard he was asexual." And then somebody said, "That's bullshit - he totally hit on my friend after a show."
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When you listen to the Anthology of American Folk Music, or anything like that - a compilation of garage bands from the Northeast in the early '60s - you're not necessarily listening to the band and thinking about the lead singer, or the story of the group, or the context or the mythology of the group. You're just listening to the song and whether or not it has a hook.
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I think people are intimidated by me, and I don't know why. Sometimes even my own bandmates can be intimidated, or irritated, by me.
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We didn't have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you're young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.
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Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music. And it's not a namedropping thing, but there's just not that many people in this certain small little genre world we live in that I don't know or am not acquainted with. And I like them all; I get along with pretty much everyone. It wouldn't be unusual to see a thousand collaborations at some point.
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I collaborate a little bit with different aspects of my own mind. I kick my own ass instead of kicking other people's asses.
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When I do a record, it sounds more punk and raw. Or it will sound louder, or it will sound more shocking. Or mind-boggling. I'll be trying to figure it out, but once I've got it figured out I'll be like, I know this; I know where this came from. I think art is most interesting when the intention is not clear.
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I realized I had written maybe, I dunno, the first ever asexual love song. Where it's really just about a fear of dying alone - you need contact, you need love, you need empathy. You need this relationship but if there's no sex involved, people act like it's not a legitimate relationship.
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I've always been interested in writing from other people's perspectives and other gender perspectives.
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What could be more experimental than me writing a straight up love song?
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I like my solitude, and I'm a strong-willed person; I'm a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.
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I've been going through some personal things that have stirred up a lot of old wounds.
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When I started having a couple of beers and loosening up, I realized how many years I had wasted going back to my hotel room alone when I could have gone and just had a beer or two.
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You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.
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I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.
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Sometimes, I do have something to say, so I'll sit there and I'll write a song to someone - and then I just throw it away because it makes me cringe.
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I've got this thing where I always kind of diss the older stuff and favor the newer stuff. I mean, it's not just my thing; every artist or musician is like that, I guess.
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It's made me cynical at a young age to see how overlooked certain groups I've admired are.