Beck Quotes
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The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing.
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But people like to say, Oh, it's in the blood. But art comes from nowhere. It comes from a vague, scary place. It's scary because you don't know when it's coming or if it will ever come again. It's this Other.
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I never really had them. I always get the eccentric kids who dress funny and sit and write poetry for three months in their bedrooms......I was going to see tons of shows when I was a teenager, so if I was a girl, would that have made me a groupie? If I wanted to shake Thurston Moore's hand or something?
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You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.
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In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments.
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There were definitely lyrics and they were very meaningful. I think.
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I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.
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Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know.
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I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by.
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Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.
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There's never any pressure on the music having to be something.
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What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give.
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Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.
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I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.
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The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.
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I didn't want to do something typical.
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I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.
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I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose.
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There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.
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Oh, the tragedy and the anguish. You just gotta Rage Against the Appliance, man. The toast is burning and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke. Rage Against the Toaster.
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When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.
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I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music.
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There are certain songs that just stick around and do something that transcends whatever time they were written in. Through different eras, people are able to impart different meaning to the song, and they become part of some sort of consciousness.
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I always loved art shows at schools. My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It's some of my favorite art... It's more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.