Broken Bells Quotes
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My dad was a Navy munitions officer, and by the end of his career, he was a specialist in nuclear weapons.
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You have to keep the recording process open. If you make too many decisions before you go in, you can lose out on those serendipitous moments that can really make a record, that I think are always required in the making of a really good record.
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Meeting Perry Farrel was kind of cool. He's such an icon, and I was such a fan of Jane's Addiction.
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There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.
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I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist.
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The thing that inspires me most is empathizing with people's flaws and seeing how they deal with them. That sort of connection you feel with someone when you realize that maybe even the negative things that they've said or done are because of insecurities or injuries they've endured.
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I've had nightmares about having to kick people out of my band because they've said that they don't like the Beatles. I'd wake up and turn to them and say, "You like the Beatles, right?"
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No matter how naturally gifted you are, it's your passion that's going to make you better and maybe touch some people.
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I really [enjoy] working with new people and just sort of the freshness of it. ... I [want] to have those new conversations, musically and otherwise.
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I was really shy as a kid.
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I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
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Going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.
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One thing that I've struggled with has been a certain amount of animosity toward the whole human race.
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I have the soundtrack for 'A Clockwork Orange,' which is kind of cool. I guess I don't really end up buying a lot of modern soundtracks. Another soundtrack I love is from a French movie called 'Betty Blue.' it has some really melancholy piano work.
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Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old. As a result, I'm still very affected and moved by their music - maybe in a way that's different from someone who grew up around it.
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If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.
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If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.
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The musicians themselves don't seem to know enough about why they're in the positions they're in, so they're afraid to lose those positions.
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I tend to [have] a lot of ideas but then just leave them in that infant form and kind of move on.
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Maybe it's just parenthood that puts you in a situation where you just have to develop a new attitude, I guess, about things.
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Even with artists I love, only about a third of their music is what really hits the sweet spot for me.
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For some reason, it seems like pop writers, it's like they just get worse or something over time. And then you're really jealous of movie directors whose careers seem to grow and they'll be 70 years old and still doing these incredible jobs. I'm going to reverse that, I hope.
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The way I was brought up, there was a little bit of prodding to do something more practical, and I wasted a lot of time trying to be a practical person.
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There is pressure that comes with everything being a big deal. I remember thinking, 'I need to survive the Shins. I don't know what I'm going to do to make a living otherwise, but I really don't want to do the Shins right now.'