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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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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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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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 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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I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist.
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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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If you're 14 and you're skinny, you can't be on the football team, basically. It's just not even really possible. But skating is something that you can do that gets that athletic urge satisfied, but you get to do it on your own terms. You can be as ballsy as you want to be. It was perfect 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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Going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.
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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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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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One thing that I've struggled with has been a certain amount of animosity toward the whole human race.
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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.
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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'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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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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What affected me the most about the Beatles was that they were the biggest band in the world and they could have done anything they wanted.
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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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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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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.'
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All I do is listen to music. It's a weird thing. It's like I have so much catching up to do. I've always been over my head. That's just the way I work best, you know. Like when you're studying for school you think, "I can only study when I have to study the night before." That kind of means you're lazy or you're a procrastinator, but for me with music it's a similar thing. It's like I've been over my head for most of my career so to speak.