Alex Chilton Quotes
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Drugs were pretty easy to quit taking. I was never addicted to anything to begin with. But then, liquor - I had to wait about another six years before I finally got around to quitting that. I'm sure glad I did.
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I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.
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I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well.
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You can't live your life being upset about things, but it's a lot easier to not be upset about it if you've got enough money yourself. If you're walking around broke and working a job from nine to five or seven to five, and you're really struggling to make ends meet, you start thinking about people who have ripped you off and getting pretty angry at them.
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Everywhere I go, there are all these Big Star freaks, and they’re nice little guys who are usually in college, and they’re kind of lonely and misunderstood, learning to play guitar.
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When you're just moving forward and you agree that you're just going to stick with the results, you don't allow room for too much self-doubt.
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The more alone I am, the more focused I can get. I've written things with people, some of which I liked and others I think are total travesties. Collaborating is trying to make a piece of music and get someone else to come up with the ideas. What's the fun of that?
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I probably write 10 things to every one that I want to use. It's easy for me to write something that's so poppy that it's wrong for me. If I was 22 years old... it's easy for me to write something that's less mature than I am or ought to be. I'm looking for something that acts my age.
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When the Box Tops first started out, I couldn't play guitar much at all. Only after we had our first hit records did I start playing.
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Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.
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Fame has a lot of baggage to carry around. I wouldn't want to be like Bruce Springsteen. I don't need that much money and wouldn't want to have 20 bodyguards following me.
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If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.
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I guess that my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I'll ever have.
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It's been like a bad dream I never woke from.
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There's just something that's greater than the sum of its parts when we play together,
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Many bands that I like that have longevity on their side with consistent members are even splits. It makes a big difference to have the other two guys involved every step of the way. It keeps the thing moving. Everyone is taken with equal degree of seriousness. It's not just because it's a four-way partnership. It also relates to taking things maturely and taking other people's thoughts into consideration.
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There's something altogether different that happens when we get together, ... Something sonically more aggressive. Our live shows are nothing short of furious.
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Most folks don't know about it. But I thought it was worth a shot, as I could direct my fans to it via my Web site.
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Being emotional people and being in our 20s, we couldn't see a reconciliation ever happening at that time. It seemed so over. It seemed like the energy in it was completely played out. We didn't want to leave the door open. In pruning it back so viciously we didn't think it would grow again. But here it is growing again.
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Sweethearts of Rodeo Drive' is inspired by the fact that a lot of people are being killed on both sides in Iraq and the average person in the States that I run into is a lot more concerned with how big their TV is. That's pretty weird. I look at my granddad's meticulously clipped headlines from World War II almost daily and I see that every action in that war was a two-inch bold print headline even if it wasn't one of the biggest battles. It was all major news. The scale of this war is a lot smaller, but someone being killed or a group of people being killed might be Page 3 or Page 12 news in the U.S.
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Our relationship, musically and friendship-wise, came to a halt for a couple of years, ... Slowly those doors opened again, and we had an opportunity to do some shows in Spain and took the chance to experiment over the course of a year or so. I spent some time repairing my friendship with Jon, and then we were probably open to anything at that point.