Bradford Cox Quotes
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A lot of Appalachian music has a certain haunted, foggy feel to it; a certain sinister quality. And that transcends who is singing it. I think it's good if an artist can represent some kind of culture that they either aspire to ignite, or that they themselves experience.
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I want to satisfy the listener, exactly. I want to entertain the audience. I want the people to leave the show with the feeling I used to leave shows with when I was young, and I couldn't get over it for another three or four days after it. I just kept reliving the set in my mind.
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I don't have the capacity to write stuff consciously. When I do, it's really awful.
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Audiences tend to dig the earlier stuff by any given musician, and the artists themselves always tend to prefer the thing that they're doing now.
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I think teenagers just don't have the persistence to pretend to like something they don't anymore. I used to do that - make myself like stuff that didn't immediately appeal to me. When you're 17 and checking out John Cage records from the library. It's not like it's got the hooks of a Ramones record, or a Beach Boys record. But at the same time, you're like, I know there's something in here that I'm supposed to understand. And then eventually you find it.
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I'm a really friendly guy, I guess, and I really like meeting people.
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As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity.
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I've been used for writing rhythm guitar chords for a long time because it's so easy to play and chords just sound good on it.
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The first thing I think I ever played in public, aside from singing in church, would have been - and this is a true story - when I was about nine or 10 years old, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. I played the theme from Twin Peaks on a little tiny Casio keyboard. People politely applauded. I just fell in love with that song and thought it was very heartbreaking.
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When money and fame happen too late, it's like pouring kerosene over a fire of self-loathing.
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The same people that always think I'm pretentious will think I'm pretentious, and the people who relate to me will continue to relate to me.
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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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I used to be a lot more engaged on an improvisational level than other people. I was always on tour and always had a guitar in my hands, and when I went back home, my battery was at full charge. I had a lot of energy to get off, just impulses that I could draw upon.
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You read about that Black Lips/Wavves fight as a spectator and you're like, "Oh man, I'm gonna pick a team to be on! I'm gonna put my two cents in as my status update on my Facebook page" or something. Not to sound like an anti-technology person, but it's just a real drag that people live their lives that way.
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I'll be honest with you, one of the things that frustrated me the most out the record leak thing, it had nothing to do with record sales - I mean, that's a joke. Has anybody looked at how many records anybody sells anymore? If you're not Jay-Z, a record leaking isn't going to affect you. It was just really personal.
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You think about people like Elvis, Kurt Cobain, or the Beatles, who grew up without privilege and needed a certain validation through peoples' acceptance, or admiration from their peers. And money is part of that, but it always comes too late.
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I see a lot of people doing an "'80s thing" who weren't even born until the '90s.
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I think the younger kids need to realize there's this whole forgotten 90s that people don't really talk about.
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I want the music to be heard as close to when I made it, as much as possible. I don't want to get into some "future of the music industry" thing, or where I stand on digital this or that, but I think it's ridiculous that a lot of people in the industry plan so far ahead that it makes a lot of improvisation impossible and makes a lot of people's expectations fixed and not fluid.
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It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn't really want attention.
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Everybody just needs to realize that when you write something you're just in one mood. I was told I needed to write it and it was overdue; I don't even remember what day it was.
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I want to build an audience that's willing to follow us in whichever direction we might choose.
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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.
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You gotta have friends, and it's really hard to have friends that don't operate on the same schedule as you or do the same kind of things you do, because they don't understand it. And then you realize that your friends - your real-life friends - it's not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you're doing than how you're doing.