Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm swept along by larger forces out of my control.
I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.
When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.
It's a natural tendency of mine to not even listen to lyrics.
I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.
I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.
I like to think that location, travel, etc, is a launching point for purely imagining.
I try to shut my brain down as much as possible. And let the melodies flow, if possible.
In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's worth owning.
I love the community and the entertainment too much. I'm used to it - it's what I saw first.
When I came back to America, I realized that world music is no joke, it really has a lot to it.
I think, if I had my choice, I would spend all my time in the studio writing, and creating music.
The more I know, the more I realise I don't know. And the more I realise I'll never truly understand.
I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.
It's just not an image I had ever put out about myself - the bedroom synth guy. The whole thing seemed ridiculous.
My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.
I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.
Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.
I can't work in Brooklyn. Unless I'm completely locked away in a studio, there's just too much distraction and stimulation.
My thought with harmonies and melodies in general, is that if it doesn't come right away then it's never going to come at all.
In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin.
It feels much more natural to move forward and grow with the instruments I've grown accustomed to. Piano, accordion, brass, ukulele.
I just reached the point where I realised, I need to stop repeating myself if I'm ever actually going to enjoy the music I'm creating.
You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that's really vague, but it's true.
After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there's this new generation of voices that are really starting to burst through the seams.
I dropped out of high school and I tried to go to community college for a little while. I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.
There was always a unique Beirut sound, it was always there, and so this time I just dove straight into that, instead of daydreaming and wandering.
I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.
I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.
I put myself in the studio and I really made sure to say, 'Well, if I would normally reach for a trumpet, why don't I reach for the next nearest instrument instead?'
As much as I try to grow as a lyricist, I tend to laugh at even calling myself that, because I think that my actual talents lie more in arrangements than they do words.
It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'
You can never not feel like that, as a working artist these days. It's funny - time off makes me nervous, but so does time on. At least the pressure wasn't coming from outside.
As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.
I spent my entire life working with the smallest budget I could get. Just working with old, junky, donated equipment. The only things I bought myself were the trumpet and the $9 ukulele.
Often when I find myself listening to music, at least 60 to 70% of it is foreign, so I don't understand a word of it. Melody to me will always be a million times more important than words.
I think that within the world of music that we work in, which is so not perfect, I think that you really do have to learn to accept your own mistakes as part of the beauty of music itself.
I was always looking outside of myself for stories and ideas and influences and then I kind of realized in 2010, that all of this time, I've developed a "sound." And I've never fully explored it.
I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else - I can't really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.
I think I spent more time on the mellotron than on any other instrument in the studio, and it got to the point where I was like, "Well, you can't write an entire album on this instrument." But maybe I would!
I think it's become much harder because I'm more afraid of every step I take. I'm more aware of its ramifications, I'm more aware of the less creative aspects of music - like the business-side of things for example.
What was pretty crazy was to plan a wedding around a tour. It felt very getting-hitched-in-Vegas style. It was like, we played a show in Salt Lake City, ran to New Mexico, we got married, and then I was off to Lisbon.
I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.
I fell off a bridge when I was 14, then had surgery when I was 17. Now my left wrist is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my [right one] and doesn't quite have the mobility to wrap around a guitar neck without a bit of pain.
I'm very flash and burn - the first thing that comes to mind is obviously the best idea, and that's because it should come out of a natural place, and if you don't do that then you're writing someone else's music, not your own.
I write one step at a time, always finishing off the part I'm working on before even thinking about the next part. I need to hear it all together before deciding what goes next. I even mix before moving on...in other words, I write by recording.
I'm not an amazing trumpet player. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. You shake the trumpet and it starts to vibrate in a ridiculous drunken way, or you flop notes at the right time and you don't have to play stuff that would take seven years to learn.
I think that there's a proliferation of music that is done entirely in the bedroom for an Internet audience, but there's no way in hell that you could actually kill off a live show, and its importance in the creation of music - it's just impossible.
I released that side of things really as kind of an introduction to where I came from musically, back in the day when all I had was a keyboard, a drum machine, and a four-track. So I was doing these little synth-pop ditties, and it's how I learned to write.
I'd been living out of a suitcase since I was 17 years old, and it just got to the point where it was ridiculous. Besides, it was really hurting everything I was trying to do in music; to feel so consistently homeless was no way to endure touring and stress.