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Pray unceasingly that all denial be stripped from your mind. Pray that something miraculous be born within us all. Give everything you have. Do not wait another day. Lay your hours and intellect, your heart and passion, upon the altar of self-transformation and collective awakening. Begin now: pray, believe, trust and act.
I love making music but with that comes a lot of responsibility and you have to put yourself out there more. I'm learning as I go. The music has drawn me out of my shell. It's made me open my door a little more and be able to look at people in the eye. In that sense of the word, it has been helpful to me so I am happy now.
If everything I did failed - which it doesn't, it actually succeeds - just the fact that I'm willing to fail is an inspiration. People are so scared to lose that they don't even try. Like, one thing people can't say is that I'm not trying, and not I'm not trying my hardest, and I'm not trying to do the best way I know how.
Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we've ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.
The music of ABBA is not that happy. It might sound happy, in some strange way, but deep within, it's not happy music. It has that Nordic melancholic feeling to it. What fools you is the girls' voices. You know, I do think that is one of the secrets about ABBA. Even when we were really quite sad, we always sounded jubilant.
I'm Kan, the Louis Vouitton don / Bought my mom purse, now she Louis Vuitton mom / Still might throw on a little low arm they want me to stop go on gon / They don't want me to shop and me spending that hard / Oh My God is that a Black card / I turned around and replied why yes, but I prefer the term African American Express
There's always a handful of 40-year-old dudes. I don't know why that is exactly. I don't know if it's like my looks or the music or what, but I seem to just really appeal to that age group. A lot of people have said to me, "What's with all the old men?," and they laugh. But to me, those are my fans and I'm happy they exist.
Christians have oppressed Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Pagans, and each other throughout their centuries of power, preaching religious intolerance as the word of Jehovah whenever they had the military, political, or economic power to make it stick - and then piously preaching brotherhood, peace, and toleration when they didn't.
Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it.
Look at all the misery in the Middle East, for example. All these countries have Islam in common, and far too few dare to criticize Islam as an ideology, and what it's doing to these countries. I know I might get punched in the face for saying these things, but my conviction is that less religion in the world would be better.
There's no love in my songs. There's just a lot of resentment. Just bad attitude. But that's intentional, that's what I like. I love the whole idea of Motown. Their idea was to sing how down on their luck they were, but the song implied hope that it would get better. I liked that idea, and I wanted to go even further with it.
I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.
I think people sometimes confuse 'catchy' with something that should automatically be a hit in today's world. I mean, obviously we write a lot of stuff that's catchy, that sticks in your head. But that doesn't necessarily mean that middle-school kids are going to want to listen to a song about a lawyer or a Subaru or whatever.
Whether I'm at a dinner with Anna Wintour or a listening party with Pusha T or in Rome with Virgil (Abloh, his style adviser) giving Fendi our designs and getting them knocked down... we brought the leather jogging pants six years ago to Fendi, and they said no. How many m*****f***ers you done seen with a leather jogging pant?
I had no problem working for 15 hours straight when I was producing someone else, but I couldn't do it with my own songs. It took that moment of pointing the camera at myself to realize that it was okay to get lost in making my own music. I think before that I was scared of pushing myself to the point of staring into the abyss.
To be fair, I don't have a lot of clothes and you know, Einstein had the same outfit, five different times because he didn't want to spend energy trying to decide what to wear every day. It's pointless. I have a shirt that I wear when I'm not on stage and then I have a sweaty shirt that is so disgusting it would blow your mind.
I do think that we're pretty future-obsessed right now, and I think that capitalism works best when we have a very short memory of the past, when we can just go forward seamlessly into a future of ever-new products and ever-new experiences - even though they're exactly the same, just on a watch instead of on a phone or whatever.
People do not look at the music business as an entrepreneur business at all times, but everything in this business is entrepreneurship. It's one thing to have the money and not have the knowledge. A lot of times people have great ideas, but don't have a plan. The whole thing about being an entrepreneur is you have to have a plan.
All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race - racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic - what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.
If you look at the steps being taken towards Scottish independence, they're being dealt with politically in very dull and boring ways. So if you just feverishly speculate numbered but random Scotlands - because in the book, it's a random sequence of possibilities - you can imagine many ways in which different things might happen.
I enjoy the optimism of design, even though we can see it as doomed. But I'm telling most people that I'm not writing about design any more this year. It makes no sense at all during the recession unless you write about sustainable or ethical design-very basic things, like how to get clean water in countries with a shortage of it.
Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction, an ambition to write and never stop until you think, 'This is the best I can do.'
The Internet, sadly, has become a preying ground for trolls and just predators. And when you're in the position that I'm in, and you have a wife and a child who had just come into this world not too long ago, you start wondering whether or not that continued interaction and some of the threats and some of the nonsense are worth it.
I was listening to country at the time too, mostly because when I was a kid growing up in the country, all my friends would listen to the CMT crap and I really hated it. That would make me really angry. But when I got older I started discovering that there was actually good country music that could sort of take me back to my roots.
I would say that the most complex style of singing comes from India. Real, classical Indian music produces probably the best technical and natural singers in the world, just because the patterns and the inflection are so complex in how the style moves and what it requires vocally. I think the best classical singers come from India.
The music world has taken a huge dump, so maybe there's a connection. So if Apple decided to do this, maybe they do their own version ... whatever they want to do it's a home run for music. Unless they screw it up, and try to put something on it so that they can own it - I'm calling it out, proprietary formats are not a good thing.
To be told that you're the voice of your generation is such an incredible amount of pressure, and I haven't faced that. Maybe by the time our third record rolls around, I will. My goals are to be a band like that in five years. At the moment, though, I can't really relate in any sense to the scale that Kurt Cobain fame has reached.
I think it's absolutely possible to write a song and go somewhere where no one's been before, uncharted territory. In terms of content, I see limitations where there should be none. I know there are things I wouldn't write about, but that shouldn't be the case. You should be able to make a song out of anything, out of any situation.
The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate.
Stockholm is unique in that it's built on islands and surrounded by water, so you get this enormous sense of freedom. It's got everything you could possibly need - everything New York or London has but without all the people and traffic. It's also become a very creative city, not only for music but also for fashion and computer games.
I don't know if there is an existing model that anyone can hold on to right now. Every [piece of] advice about how to go about in the record business you would get 5 years ago is no longer valid. Everything is changing very rapidly and there is an increased sense of anger and despair among artists that are not major-selling megastars.
Writing a song isn't that hard. Writing a good song is difficult. Let's face it, we're faced with taking a complex feeling or event, making words rhyme and saying exactly what we want them to say in a short amount of time. ...the primary reason for keeping it short and to the point is to be certain that you're not boring your audience.
I know those challenges that come up from time to time in life are our little learning tools, our little steppingstones. If we didn't have those things in our life, how would we learn anything? We would just be walking around like nothing. We need those obstacles in our life because I know one thing - I'm a much better person for them.
The things that drive me are poverty, and pain, and knowing that I don't want to end up being alone and I want to do something with my life and I want the name Dobson to remain in everyone's heads. Basically, just to rock and be the best performer I can be, and be true, and be real, and give people the real Fefe, nothing fake, all real.
There are definitely some songs you sing and you just know there's something about it - there's kind of a touch on it that's different. But there are no rules to that. Every time, it's a surprise and it's humbling to hear that people are singing the songs in different places and different parts of the world. We're always amazed by that.
I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I'm sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don't even know when you're being compromised till after the fact, and that's what you regret.
The idea of the gay experience, it feels like a relic. I felt like in the '90s when we were watching the gay characters on 'The Real World,' there was definitely a gay experience that was distinct from a straight experience. If you talk to high schoolers in 2017, I don't know that is as much a part of how they experience a social dynamic.
The more people who come from musical backgrounds and go into promotion, production, songwriting, A&R, plus get their business head together, the better. They'll not only understand the business aspect, they'll also have a true passion and ear for how quality is represented musically. Plus consumers will always have a hunger for R&B music.
If you're up on a stage, naked and solo and singing songs to people, there's not much place to hide, so you may as well confess what you want to confess and say what you want to say, whatever that is. Some songs just turn out as being more about me, and some are more through the eyes of other people, or third-person descriptions of people.
I'm still just a kid learning about minimalism, and he's a master of it. It's just really such a blessing, to be able to work with him. I want to say that after working with Rick, it humbled me to realize why I hadn't - even though I produced "Watch the Throne"; even though I produced "Dark Fantasy" - why I hadn't won Album of the Year yet.
Despite the fact that I trust the people at major labels who tell me that they want to offer me a home as a "stable artist," who can just do what he does for the long haul, time has shown that it rarely works out that way - the bottom line is the bottom line, not mention the threat of mergers and firings and whatnot, and people get dropped.
It's so hard to do fittings [for Yeezy] because we want to do things that are inspiring, that people could look at and say, "Wow, I like that color palette, I could put that together." And there are so many images of things that it's almost impossible to have your clothes go up against the amount you're seeing and carry it into one language.
England never felt claustrophobic for me at all. I think it would feel more difficult for me if I lived in mainland Europe. America I think is really easy because Los Angeles has film stars everywhere and musicians and Santa Barbara a lot of people have homes there even if they don't live there. You are kind of inconsequential, no one cares.
I've always felt for little children because I love the way they fashion sentences - their vocabulary is limited. They have to navigate around to get to the meaning. It's a shame we bypass that when we gain more words. In a way, it's less honest and less direct. It's something that I appreciate about kids, and I will steal from them at will.
Because when you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in their face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you're disrespectful to inspiration, and we as musicians have to inspire people who go to work every day, and they listen to that Beyonce album and they feel like it takes them to another place.
I was born three weeks early, and I kept being ill. From the age of zero to four, I was always in hospital having tests done, but they couldn't find out what was wrong. They discovered that one of my kidneys wasn't working properly, and it had scarred. I had to have 32 injections in my arm in the morning and evening to try and make me better.
My father was able to play a number of musical instruments and I fell in love with classical music in my teens and I allowed it to influence me. I like to think I took and still do from classical music and various techniques, I have made classical albums and recorded seven different pieces of Bach on different albums and its all music too me.
People say to me 'you're successful, what are you crying about?'. I'm crying about the people. I'm crying about their daughters. Our daughters, as one family. What good is it. What good is anything that everyone can't have. Every ism. They think we're done with racism. What about elitism, what about separatism, what about classism? That's all.
Portland has influenced me in that it is very much where I feel most "at home" in the world. I grew up there. My family is there, my closest friends are there; my favorite bookstore, record store and coffee joint are there. Portland changed a lot during the eight years I lived in Bellingham but, every time I went back, it always felt like home.
All the things I used to count on to get my music out there - record companies, they're all gone. And radio stations, they're gone - they're completely controlled by the government. If they're not controlled by the government, they're controlled by a programmer who's controlled by the government. Mainstream radio is suspect. You can't trust it.