Broken Bells Quotes
-
For the longest time, I didn't even want to admit I was serious about music. Before the Shins, I would tell myself, 'Oh, I'm going to figure something out someday.' I had this romantic vision of being this old dude maybe making guitars or something.
-
Meeting Perry Farrel was kind of cool. He's such an icon, and I was such a fan of Jane's Addiction.
-
My dad was a Navy munitions officer, and by the end of his career, he was a specialist in nuclear weapons.
-
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.
-
There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.
-
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.
-
No matter how naturally gifted you are, it's your passion that's going to make you better and maybe touch some people.
-
I was really shy as a kid.
-
I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
-
Going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.
-
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.
-
I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist.
-
One thing that I've struggled with has been a certain amount of animosity toward the whole human race.
-
Even with artists I love, only about a third of their music is what really hits the sweet spot for me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We played a festival in Ireland once, and in the middle of 'New Slang,' the Scissor Sisters kicked in across the field on this mega stage. It was a little distracting. It was hard to keep track of what I was supposed to sing.
-
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.
-
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?"
-
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.
-
I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.
-
I tend to [have] a lot of ideas but then just leave them in that infant form and kind of move on.
-
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.