Washed Out Quotes
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I naturally like that dreamy, shoegazey sound on my vocals. A lot of reverb helps, and so do a lot of delay effects on everything.
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I lived in a neighborhood where there weren't many kids. I had a couple sisters, but I was very much a loner. Whatever film I had seen that day or that week, I would completely find myself in that world.
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I try to be as optimistic as I can. I feel like that's the beautiful thing about art and music. It can take you places, and they can be a positive influence. A very soothing influence. Honestly, I feel like there's enough pain and terrible things that happen in life. That's beautiful thing in art, you can really idealize things.
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A lot of the things I was doing on the first couple Washed Out releases was very naive.
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I do have the personnel that we use in the back of my head when I'm working, but I also don't want to limit myself.
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My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of this peach orchard. It's actually Peach County, one of the largest peach-growing counties in Georgia. It's very rural, and there is nothing much going on, so I guess that's had a big influence on everything as far as just not having much to do.
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When I first started writing songs, I never intended on singing. I didn't really consider myself a singer at all. I was just kind of recording the demo vocals as a holding place until someone else came and sang.
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Ultimately, what interests me is using exotic sounds in my songs.
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I get very bored easily. I'm a child of the Internet or whatever; I want more and more of new and interesting things.
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I do try to structure everything in a way that's very much like a pop song. I try to keep the arrangements really simple, just to make everything essential.
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I have a little basement studio set up here at my house, and I do probably 80 percent of the recording here on my own. With multi-tracking technology, I can play various parts on top of one another.
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When I'm not touring, I hardly ever leave my house. Part of it is I get to do what I'm most passionate about, which is work on music and make new songs.
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My first big influences were more hip-hop based - people like DJ Shadow and Four Tet.
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I think '80s pop music subconsciously informs what I'm doing.
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I like an even-keeled, slow-paced job.
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Any musician - I would say 99% of musicians - needs some help along the way. Most people, even if they're self-produced, have someone else mix it, or they'll have someone else master the record. Inevitably, it's like somebody else's personality being put into your art.
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I'm very happy in my life, but I do feel that music has a power to transport you to places or to beautiful moments in your past.
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I felt like I was building this world brick by brick with each layer of instrumentation I was doing. I could see it growing in some ways. I feel like most writers feel the same way. You're almost living inside of this magic world that you're building.
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My music is a personal thing, and I feel like if I talk too much about the songs, or if there's too much of my personal life out there, it ruins it.
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It's like a painter with various layers of paint. I start with a drum loop and add keyboards, and then melodies start to take shape. The vocals happen later. I've never really done therapy before, but it's a form of therapy. Everything else falls away.
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For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.
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The types of melodies I tend to write kind of have this bittersweet quality; they're meant to be uplifting but kind of have this melancholy vibe to it.
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I know of some guitar-based rock bands that refuse to record anything that they can't play live. But some of the best stuff I come up with are studio-based performances - bringing out whatever accident I had in the studio and building a song around that.
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It's very hard to find perfection in your life. But in the art world you can do that.