Adam Schlesinger Quotes
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I just like to stay busy, and I like to work with interesting people.
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For me, it's just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds. The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while.
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London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.
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With the TV stuff, we usually hand in final, finished tracks. The turnaround time is so tight that there's no time to demo anything; you just do it.
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As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.
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I always have to be thinking about who's going to be singing this song, what the context is. I don't sit around just writing in a vacuum, ever.
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It's always been my philosophy to keep a lot of balls in the air. With music, most things don't pan out, so you try to increase your odds by being involved with a million things at once.
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I'm not comfortable as a lead singer. Maybe I could do it in the studio, but I wouldn't have the confidence to play shows.
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I just try to tell a story rather than present an open diary to the world.
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I had a job transcribing a biotechnology-litigation seminar. You put headphones on and fast-forward and stop with your feet. There were a lot of 'um's.'
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We were called 'Three Men Who, When Standing Side by Side, Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet.' We had that name for a week or so. We were also called 'Are You My Mother?' for awhile. We went through a lot of really dumb band names - almost as dumb as Fountains of Wayne.
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If you're sitting in a place like Martha's Vineyard, I don't think you're going to write a song about a ski resort.
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I think with musicals, it's much more part of the script. They don't want songs that would stop the show; they need songs that keep the plot moving.
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Every year, there's some band that plays guitar-oriented pop music that has a single, but for the most part, it's kind of relegated to the sidelines.
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I think in most cases, when you're writing a song, you're just making up a little story, and you're not really thinking about making a point one way or another about it. You're just coming up with a little scenario and seeing it through, and that's it.
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Making your own records is really satisfying in the sense that you more or less get to do what you want. It may not sell or whatever, but on an artistic level, the only people that you really have to fight with are the people in your own band.
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The truth is that I don't work any harder than anyone else in the world. I don't work 18-hour days. I don't stay up until 4 in the morning trying to finish a line.
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Really, music is what I'm interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing.
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In the '80s, they were using an awful lot of technology but hadn't really figured out how it worked yet... You had these really great, simple pop songs turned into these gigantic overproductions.
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I don't ever feel like I'm being an actor.
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Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful - and definitely enough to keep doing more.
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I've never really had the desire to be a front person or a solo artist. I don't really create that much of a hierarchy in my mind.
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I'm just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that's writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work.
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Most of your day is spent working, and being in a band is no different. We're just business travelers in a way.