Stephen Malkmus Quotes
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If you'd rather learn how to ride a horse or something, I would say do that. That'll keep you out of trouble. You would think a band would get you in trouble, but I think it's the opposite.
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Family is the best. I can honestly say, it's a gift that is beyond making art. I didn't know that when I got into it.
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I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.
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When I was a kid I really liked the guitarist of The Doors [Robby Krieger]. He plays blues, but he plays a lot of melodic things. He plays scales that are kind of unusual, and some bent notes.
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I never decided to start singing, to be a singer.
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It's hard to think back. I didn't even know I was going to do it, make actual records. But I was always making up songs, once I figured out that you could do it. I think it's pretty much the same, but there's less urge to get it moving out there. There was a time when it seemed like it was really super important to the audience and now it's just medium-important for people to like us. But that's okay.
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I do play soccer, but it's exhausting in a way.
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Besides, going on tour and playing songs and arranging things, going to practice, it's all I know to be productive.
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Berlin is just an affordable European city that's supposed to be cool. There's nothing too deep about it.
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My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
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What we're doing now, it's usually more based on records that I've bought or a projection of what I can do well now and the inner dynamics of playing with the people I'm playing with, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme, what we come up with. What works for us doesn't, like, have that much relation to the past.
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I've been getting plenty off my chest. Sometimes I get too much off my chest and I regret it.
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I'm sort of socially inept, so music is my way to connect to people. It's a means of socializing and having a life. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. I would just make home recordings and play them for myself. And that's not really healthy.
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It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.
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The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.
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If you have no shame, and it’s your goal to get people into bed, how much higher could your success rate possibly be?
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Well, yeah, I sang to some songs on the radio or in the shower.
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I didn't really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny.
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Оur music, it's an acquired taste. It's almost cult, even at our level. It can mean nothing to somebody and it can mean everything to somebody else.
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I did some writing. I was just taking the kids to school. I did a couple things and we did some tours. It was a lot of downtime.
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Almost every band has somebody who's the main songwriter and who has a vision, a very clear idea of how a song should be.
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We care if people like what we did. If you're just making records for yourself, why put them out and do all these interviews and do touring? I'm a huge music fan, and this is what I do with my artistic time. It's all I really do, except hang out with my family. I value human relationships, and it's a way for me to interact with the world and feel like I'm part of something.
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I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
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The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.
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I'm not dying for everyone to hear everything we do. Forty minutes every two years is sensible.
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You don't realize that when you're young, and you're surprised there's a lot of people at your gig - you just think it's general British-press hype.
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If there can be some paradigm shift thing that you can be part of, that's cool.
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In the early '90s, it felt like there was space - there was like an empty feel. There was nobody really doing this. Maybe the Pixies were, a little bit. Their lyrics were also disjointed, more psychosexual or something. That's part of youth, too, maybe, that you just feel like you're doing something different.
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I just don't think people listen. I mean, they can't listen to a whole album closely without checking their iPhone or wanting to skip to their favorite song, or putting something else on, practically. That's why the zone out is a good thing.
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We always did our own mixing.
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