The National Quotes
- All Quotes
- News Quotes
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'Alligator' was the first record that anyone paid attention to, and it seemed like it was the screamy songs that got us that attention.
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I don't play an instrument. I pretend. I try to.
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I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.
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A lot of my lyrics are approximate meaning without me knowing why they sound right.
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Once you do have a child, you want to talk about every detail of it. And it is really boring to all your friends, and it should be. I was really worried about even going there at all.
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Musicians are hungry for new music.
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For me, the exhausting thing about touring is the sitting around, which is why working on my concert music is really great - and also seeing concerts and seeing friends and, whenever possible, getting out to see a museum.
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I don't love being on the road.
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A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.
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I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
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If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable.
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Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.
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I'm a stubborn guy that loses his temper, sometimes driving the station wagon in the wrong direction for hours and hours and never admitting that he's gone the wrong way.
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If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.
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With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.
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I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.
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The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.
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Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
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Getting on stage and performing and standing under lights is such an unsettling experience - in a good and bad way - but it's the only place I can go to feel comfortable.
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David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
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The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.
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When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.
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You don't come to our shows if you want to look cool.
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As much as you try to organize your life, life will surprise you.