Broken Bells Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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 kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
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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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Going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.
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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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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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One thing that I've struggled with has been a certain amount of animosity toward the whole human race.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.