Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just got back from Hawaii on Saturday, and it's so depressing how quickly all the stresses and the stressful energy of L.A. comes bombarding back. Everyone's in a rush, you're annoying everyone, get out of their way, everyone's most important than you are, has got somewhere more important to be - very draining town. But I still love it in many ways. I wouldn't leave California. I think it's a fantastic state, if you can't be in Hawaii all the time.
If you're going to be an artist, you have to create music that moves you, and to not try to fit in so much with what's happening around you. It's a career choice. I could have done other kinds of songs that got me in the radio or Top 10, but I wouldn't feel proud of the work. I come up short when I create music I don't like, and fans can tell too. The goal isn't to get into it to be famous; the goal is to perfect your craft and create your own sound.
One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.
Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.
I take things a little bit more critically now, like, "What did I think I was saying in that song? What is this song about?" I thought the lyrics were incredibly descriptive, and now they sound really cryptic and weird. I'd like to also think that when I listen to songs from Something About Airplanes that I'm proud of my development as a writer. I don't think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
I think that the idea of finding another person to share your life with is the most fascinating, beautiful quest you could ever be on in life. And yes, living your dreams is so important too, and a lot of times I’ve put that before everything else. But then you get to a place where the whole time you’re living these dreams, you look beside you to say to someone, “Hey, isn’t this so much fun?” And if there’s no one there to say it to, what’s the point?
There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"
There's a common threat facing all of us - Christians, Jews, and Muslims - and that is the Antichrist. It's a very deep subject, and it's a horrendous thing to contemplate. Someone will appear who is, in fact, the opposite of what he appears to be. Some people will believe in him, and that's really frightening. In Islam, there's a belief that Jesus will return to destroy the Antichrist, which is something many people don't know about the Islamic faith.
That there's no link between Islam and Christianity and Judaism. There wouldn't be Islam if there wasn't Christianity or Judaism, because it's all one long line of revelation. Seeing it from that point of view it makes you ask yourself why Muslims sometimes separate themselves from that large family that leads to Abraham and, even before that, to Adam. The only answer is that we're conditioned to do it by thinking, Hey, I do things better than he does.
I was new, and it was like that movie "Mean Girls". This clique would tease me and make up rumors about me being gay. I don't even know why they did it. I came home crying one day and told my mom I couldn't be around them anymore. So we decided I would be homeschooled. I think it's important to check in with yourself and make sure you are being exactly who you want to be. When I am true to who I am, I'm a better girfriend. I'm just more happy being me.
I realized I was growing up or something like that. You have responsibilities...you've got to think about getting your act together. I didn't even know what it had been doing to me. I didn't realize how dangerous it was. People talked in terms of drugs and I used to think in terms of...well in Ireland, everybody drinks. Nobody gives it a second thought. You're Irish number one and you're a drinker number two. That's the first two things about us Irish.
A lot of times when people meet me, theyll definitely try to make me feel young or inexperienced. Like, Its all taken care of. Teenagers are such a discerning group of people. Theyll immediately sniff out anything that feels contrived. Im, like, constantly scanning myself to see if Im some corporate executive version of a teenager. Ive developed something of a fearsome reputation. People know that if you talk down to me, I will roll my eyes or whatever.
I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she'd start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to "make believe" ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock. My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote "Misty", Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well.
I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.
Everything that happens to me gets put into a song. For some reason, I'm really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs. There, I don't hold back: names, dates, times, expressions on people's faces, exactly where we were and how it felt, what I wish I would have said to them in the moment. So I'm not only excited about sharing the songs with fans; I'm also pretty interested to hear the response from the guys I've written about on the record.
Men are not as sophisticated as women. They're not as mature as women. They're not as connected with their emotions as women...There's a very Neanderthal quality that still exists in a lot of men... And if you're in the public eye, to me, it's very boring to say what you have to say and be media trained to the extent that you don't ever reveal any truth. There was a time in my life when I lived probably a bit more on the primal level. And it was amazing.
What makes me feel alive is community, connectedness. Certainly family, parenting, relationships, friendship. All the way into colleague relationships and relationship with spirit, relationship with one's own self and inner child, and animals, earth, planet. Fostering and nurturing and really focusing on connection - connection in relationship with other and my own self and God. When I don't feel connected in all those three areas, life is not very good.
In the beginning, I didn't realize that I was so open with my feelings, and I had to stop and think to myself, I couldn't possibly be the only one in the world going through this. Perhaps this will help other people when I face my fears and allow people to come into my space. These are the things that I worked through, and in a sense, it's great that I was able to share that, although I was terrified after I realized that I was sharing it with the world.
I remind myself that the universe is 15 billion years old, and I'm only 46 years old, so my perspective is sort of limited and fear-based and skewed. So I sort of turn things over to whatever you want to call it - whether it's God, or the universe or the spirit of the universe - and I just sort of turn things over to God and hope that this spirit that has been around for 15 billion years will have a better understanding of how things should be than I do.
As you get older, your songwriting starts to become less and less about you, and especially when you have kids and a family. You start to see the world through other people's eyes a lot more to the point where it's hard to go back and relate to that "me against the world" perspective that I think a lot of my earlier songs were about. It's not so much about "me against the world," it's, how do you make the best possible future for your kids to grow up in?
What came first I would say was the producing. I was a huge fan of Pharrell Williams and around that era, when I was in high school, the producers started getting recognition for all the dope beats: Dr. Dre, Timbaland, and all these dope producers.I also started rapping. I wanted to be Eminem, and that's why I still have those qualities in my music, and that's why I'm able to be so versatile - sing, rap whatever. But really my number one thing is singing.
Education spurs growth and unlocks potential. After all, a single year of primary education creates a 10 to 20 percent increase in a woman's wages later in life. Education lowers the risk of disease and decreases the likelihood that a child will fall into violence and crime. And a child born to a literate mother is 50 percent more likely to survive past age five. No country has achieved sustained growth without at least 40 percent literacy for its adults.
All you do is you go back to the Maida Vale Studios at BBC in London, and it feels like you're in a spaceship. It feels like you're in 2001 or something like that. It's massive and well constructed and highly technologically advanced and occupied by these wise scientists, engineers, and producers. Listening to it, it just doesn't sound like me - that's a younger self that didn't know who he was or what he was doing. I can't identify with a nebulous cloud.
I've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"
I certainly didn't predict people who spent years actively disliking the band to all of a sudden like the band. That's pretty funny to me, and it makes playing live kind of interesting, 'cos we're doing lots of things that don't really have a lot to do with that record, and even presenting the songs off that record in a way that's a little more muscular and without as much of the sheen, which is what I think part of what people really liked [about Kaputt].
I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy trying to be a better artist and I still [do]. I spend a lot of time focusing on my craft. If you're going to take your passion into something beyond just something for fun on the side, you got to spend a lot of time on it to be great, and then you've got to make smart decisions about who you collaborate with [and] where you live [to] put yourself in the right situations to meet the right people to catch those breaks.
There are so many stupid things that steal that purpose from us. The stupid things that you believe a lie that we ‘re not as important as we really are. That our life isn’t as important as it really is. It’s important to the people that you love, it’s important to the people that you will love in the future, it’s important to the world around you and it’s so important that you fulfill the purpose that only you can fulfill the way that you can fulfill that.
The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.
I've had a pretty crazy life. It's colorful ... reliving some of those closets that I had shut, locked and thrown away the key intentionally because it was painful to revisit a lot of those places - especially the loss of my buddy Robbie Tooley, the divorce of my parents, some of the things I went through as a kid, a lot of that stuff was locked up for a reason - it was painful. But at the same time, there was some therapy in revisiting some of those spots.
Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau. European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.
You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.
Well, my dad was into music, but he wasn't into me being into music. In my house when I was a kid, when I was real young, my dad wanted us all to play sports, and we were jock-like. We had a lot of money. And my brother was sort of the light of our family, and he was a good athlete. And I wasn't a very good athlete, but I tried to be. And then when I was 15 my dad went bankrupt, and we moved to Houston. And I went with him, but then I went back to Portland.
I read the reviews sometimes, but I don't let it really affect the next album because, for me, when I approach an album, it's usually coming to me pretty naturally. It's not like I set out, like, "Okay, I'm going to write an album this month." It's more like I'm just always writing songs and eventually I start to realize that a group of songs sort of fits together, and I go from there in putting together the album and themes and artwork and things like that.
Early on I was a lot more unsure of myself on stage. When our band The Decemberists was getting bigger audiences I was more concerned about alienating them, so I wasn't as willing to take risks and do weird stuff on stage. But once you get more accustomed to it you tend to have more fun with it and not worry about being pilloried for acting out. Whenever you play in front of 400 or 500 more people than you're used to it's always a weird, transitional period.
Instead of my telling people what they should be doing, it makes more sense to be an inspiration to them. I'm not perfect by any means. I've done some stupid things, and I'm very aware of that. In this day and age, you have to have a sense of humor about it, and at the same time, it's made me a lot more aware that you have to take responsibility for your actions. For me, it's about staying on the path. If I slip, that's OK; just get back up and keep focused.
The music brings me confidence and freedom. It's also the thing that can make me feel the most vulnerable. Once I finish writing all the songs for an album, once I actually record them, that whole process is usually easy and enjoyable. The part where I feel the most vulnerable is when it's all finished, I can make no more changes, I've turned it in, and there's no going back. All of a sudden I hear the songs in a different way; that's when I feel vulnerable.
Probably the most cold-hearted thing I ever did. There was this spider in my shower - and I'm usually very kind to all of the creatures of the world - and you feel very vulnerable when you're naked, and I didn't really want to be near this spider he was kinda big and gnarly looking. The only thing that I could reach in the shower was this hairspray. So I hairspray-ed this spider to death, which was awful. I felt like such a jerk. It was really, really harsh.
My choice is what I choose to do, And if I'm causing no harm, it shouldn't bother you. Your choice is who you choose to be, And if you're causin' no harm, then you're alright with me. If you don't like my fire, then don't come around, 'cause I'm gonna burn one down. Yes, I'm gonna burn one down. Herb the gift from the earth, And what's from the earth is of the greatest worth. So before you knock it try it first, Oh, you'll see it's a blessing and not a curse.
I'm not as religious as some people about "the album." To be honest, that was a product of a format. You had vinyl, and you could fit five songs on each side, and that's 45 minutes. You had A-side songs and B-side songs; I always loved the first song on side B. And there's nothing wrong with that. Prog albums of the 70s adapted to that format very much. But not all musicians want to create 45 minutes of music that has to be listened to in chronological order.
In the country field, we’re brought up in spiritual homes, we’re taught to “judge not lest you be judged,” and it’s always been a mystery to me how people jump all over things just to criticize, condemn and judge other people when that is so un-Christian – and they claim to be good Christians! We’re supposed to love one another. We’re supposed to accept and love one another. Whether we do or not, that’s a different story. But that’s what we’re supposed to do.
When I was 16, I used to drive huge loads of laundry in a three ton truck. I would turn round at night to drive back and see the band in a place north of Toronto called Dunn's Pavilion. I would drive that truck all day and they drive back and all the way until one day I wrecked the truck. I fell asleep and wrecked it. I was OK and so was my helper. I called my dad and the first words out of his mouth were, "are you OK?" I was really lucky I had a kind father.
If my choice is to, I don’t know, be with a lot of men, or if I enjoy a really physical relationship, I don’t think that’s necessarily being anti-feminist. For me the argument of feminism never really should have come into the picture. Because I don’t know too much about the history of feminism, and so I’m not really a relevant person to bring into the conversation. Everything I was writing was so autobiographical, it could really only be a personal analysis.
It's late at night and I can't sleep. Missing you just runs too deep. Oh I can't breathe, thinking of your smile. Every kiss I can't forget, this aching heart ain't broken yet. Oh God I wish I could make you see Cause I know this flame isn't dying So nothing can stop me from trying Baby you know that Maybe it's time for miracles Cause I ain't giving up on love You know that maybe it's time for miracles Cause I ain't giving up on love No I ain't giving up on us
I had the opportunity, as a child, to grow up in a community center where I was exposed to theater, music, art, and computer science; things that I would have never had the opportunity to even meet had it not been for those people taking time out of their schedules, helping us as children to travel all over the world while sitting in a gymnasium. That's what I did before I was a musician, before I was a recording artist, I was a teacher and a community leader.
The great thing about [Michael] Jordan was that he made them want it just like he wanted it. And a lot of times like a lot of the basketball players, not to be getting on basketball, but, with a lot of the basketball players you might have one superstar on the team, and they're not willing to play up to par with the way he is, so they don't make it. But then you have some celebrities on the basketball team, and they don't know how to get along with each other!
If 5000 people bought my record, I would appreciate those 5000 people. I make music for them because music isn't supposed to be so money driven. I didn't get into the music game because I wanted to make money. I sing because that's a God given talent of mine and it's something I love to do. If it's 10,000 or a million people, I'm going to give people the music they like from me. That's what being an artist is. Whoever likes your work, that's who you do it for.
The more passive one's life in the field, the greater the need to reverse the situation when one returns home, which is why the arcane and authoritative character of academic writing may be seen, to some extent, as a vengeful reaction to the inertia, uneventfulness, and waiting one had to endure as a guest at someone else's banquet. A way of redressing an existental imbalance, as it were reclaiming authorial will by superimposing one's own meaning on theirs...
I'm very appreciative of, and I also, having traveled the world, know that the United States is one of the few places where there really are no limitations. As long as you've got drive and hard work and a good idea and you can get out there and do your thing, there's no social classes, so in a lot of countries there's a big history of regardless of how much money you may make, there's still that little thing where you're not in society. That doesn't exist here.
The Taboo scene was a kind of deconstructed version of the New Romantics. The Taboo crowd was using a lot of the visual ideas that had already been used. I remember the first time I spotted Leigh Bowery and Trojan parading around in clubs: They were in their "Pakis from Outer Space" look, and the makeup was quite similar to one of my old looks, because I was quite fond of wearing blue, green, or yellow foundation, and so I was pretty dismissive of them at first.
There are some bands for whom that works very well and it's no disrespect to them because I'm sure there's something honest and natural about it, but for us I feel like it would be dishonest and kinda disrespectful to that artwork to do that. To be like: "Okay, we're going to go back and only play these songs, even though we have an hour to an hour and a half set and we gotta play more songs, but we'll skimp you on your extra half hour." That's just silly to me.