Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A lot of the music comes out of that conflict of wanting this other thing and feeling guilty about wanting it, and then it guiding me somewhere despite my kicking and screaming.
As soon as we wrote the beat for 'Romeo,' I knew it was a running song. I was thinking about it in terms of the body. What do you want to do? It's not a song you want to dance to.
It's a lot different being a hip-hop artist. You just show up with a piece of paper with your words on it, say it in the mic, then you leave and some other guy does all the music.
My parents got divorced when I was really young and I was a very hyperactive kid, so both parents independently would play Enya at the house to calm me down and soothe me as a kid.
'Ashes Of Love' has much more hot-blooded vocal than what PC Music is known for, and a much harder production than what I usually do, so I was fully prepared for people to hate it.
And a pang is ultimately private. It's not a thing that gets broadcast to the world; it's a kind of internal alarm that sounds when something has to change and it has to change fast.
But I never imagined that I could ever have a career in music. I always thought it was like a mafia, that you had to sell your soul and know the right people and be in the right place.
I guess this song isn't about anything necessarily sad, but it makes me sad just because it makes me think about how inaccessible the past is, but it's called 'Boy Child' by Scott Walker.
If you want to know what the DJ is playing, just ask. You don't have the right to stick your head in front of my screen as if you're an expert leaning over the shoulder of the apprentice.
Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.
Low' was probably the album that influenced me more than any other, because of how it combined humor and impressive, glamorous, driving energy with this totally surreal soundscape production.
When I came up in a band - not just in a band, but a kind of underground DIY community - there was such a clear cut distinction between what pop was and what not pop was in very simplistic terms.
I would love to live in Japan again, but would need to really commit to learning the language before doing it. Both my parents speak Japanese fluently, so I suppose it would feel like a tradition.
But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.
My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.
I was born in New York, but I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut - that's where I went to school. I remember begging my way into choir in the 3rd grade, because you're not supposed to get in until 4th grade.
When I was 10, I would hear songs like "I Love You Always Forever" by Donna Lewis on the radio, and I want to make stuff that a 10 year old might hear coming out of the radio and think, "Yeah! I love this!"
The men's dance style in dancehall is territorial, but it's also flirtatious and it's also showing off strength by way of smooth movement that you can only do if you're really strong. It has so much attitude.
Yes, when I come up with ideas on my own, it's almost always a melody, just as often an instrument or bassline as it is a vocal. But it is a single, linear, monophonic thing. Something you could hum or whistle.
I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.
I kind of think that's the best way to operate; even when I'm in sessions writing with other artists, I'm always pulling from the kind of emotions that are the most raw in my own life and offering them up in the studio.
If I'm receiving an email from a stranger, I usually like it to be properly thoughtful and explanatory, and not just hitting someone up for a casual favor out of the blue who you've never met before. I really believe in manners.
One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.
Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.
When you meet someone, a friend, who's living out on the road, or living semi-homeless, or leading their life in a radically different way, it makes you think about your own life in a really critical way and feel completely disoriented.
I woke up in London one morning in the middle of an adrenaline surge, and I was just lying there - the sun was coming up - trying to think of the best way to describe this feeling, and 'pang' was the only word I could really use to describe it.
But I studied art in Belgium from the age of 17 to 18, and I learned French when I was there. Very reluctantly so. I didn't do a very good job. For the first six months I was very depressed and couldn't speak to anyone, and then it kinda hits you.
If you're walking through the Union Square subway station - New Yorkers know it's obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it's too hot - there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.
Radio is so cutthroat, but I do feel like the music industry is structured so differently than it used to be. I'm amazed and in awe of artists who can build a parallel universe that's so big and clearly defined that the mainstream finally has to pay attention.
I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.
But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.
The music industry has completely restructured itself in the last couple of years because it hasn't been making money. Labels are signing bands they trust as artistic entities, instead of cash cows. They're signing bands because they believe that the bands have tastes beyond anything they could concoct themselves.
I think all the songs [at Moth] are about different things, but if we were to speak about it as a whole, it's really about, it's about joy, and about sensuality and vulnerability and also fun, energy, living in New York in 2015, being out of control, wanting to be in control, failing! It's a sort of story of our lives.
You know how some trees have those ear mushrooms that just grow off, and you could live on one of those mushrooms and not realize that there was stacks and stacks of others? That's how I describe music scenes in New York. That's one of the trippiest things about living here - just how many parallel universes there are that you can be completely unaware of.