Broken Bells Quotes
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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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I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.
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So happy that Broken Bells is a thing in my life and really cool in so many ways. Not only, like, as something to sell records and be a band and whatnot, but just to give me an outlet and give me a fresh approach on 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.
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A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you.
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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.
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In the end, I think musicians know that getting up in the morning and making music you love doesn't necessarily mean that you deserve billions of dollars or worship from anybody.
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The part of modern pop music I don't know much about is hip hop.
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I'm not really excited about the idea of committing to anything permanently.
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I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.
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There's something artistic about skating. A psychologist could tell you exactly why that is, but I think there's something much more expressive that gives you a lot of room for unique and individual expression. Whatever you're interested in can become something you kind of own in your group of skater friends.
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I tend to write a pretty half and half split of, like, slow, morose things and then sort of more upbeat stuff.
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I remember being in high school, and you had to draw those lines and define yourself. I don't think when I was in high school I would have been willing to admit that I liked the Shins. I was into TSOL and Black Flag. I probably would have listened to the Shins secretly in my bedroom.
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I kissed my first girl when I was 15, and then I lost my virginity when I was 17. So that's pretty good. It was just that when you're in high school, you're sort of forced into the normal world, where you're competing with the football players, just kind of in that world where somebody like me didn't quite fit in.
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I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing.
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I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before.
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I'm trying to avoid having regrets about missing opportunities. That would be the worst thing. Like having an audience waiting, and not working hard enough, and coming out with a record that disappointed them.
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I think that was going on with bands like The Strokes was that the idea of the band, a real band, was making a comeback. My brother in law is an example- before he was listening to some country music, even some of that awful nu-metal stuff , but there weren't many options really.
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There's no real reason for me to be so obsessed with trying to understand the true nature of things. You can live a perfectly happy life being utterly confused and not knowing.
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My dad and I get into it all the time. He loves to discuss politics much more than I do and we have pretty heated conversations.
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My extended family is very political and very polar with each other, and it's put a bad taste in my mouth. All the rhetoric going back and forth and sort of hating on each other. So I'm not an extremely politically active person at this stage of my life.
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I do like talking with friends about big concepts, you know, the stuff that will ruin a party. To me, the party hasn't begun until we're talking about the nonexistence of God.
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I suppose, if someone was into baseball for an extended period of time during their formative years, they're always going to be interested in it.