For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.
For years, my mom dated a man who was really active in the Baptist church in the town next to the town I grew up in, and so he used to drag me to these Baptist church services that lasted forever. I remember that I didn’t like the church services, but I really liked the music.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song’s hook.
I feel compelled to make art that on one hand reflects and sometimes almost creates like a sense of comfort when confronted with the strangeness of the world.
I joined Facebook purely so I could play online Scrabble. You have eight tiles instead of seven, so you tend to have higher scores. I’m somewhere between 400 and 500.
I’m pretty much a realist. There’s a certain age you get to when you’re not really going to be shown anymore.
I like noise. It’s always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.
I love the fact that no one’s ever bought my record because they were enamoured of the way I look. Maybe one person. There must be someone out there with compromised taste.
I love to be busy. I’m envious of people who are able to take their spare time and relax. All I like to do is work. Perhaps it’s lingering Calvinist guilt?
There are certain songs that if people come up to me and tell me how much that song meant to them, I think, You should have better taste, then, because I don’t really like that song.
A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.
A great song is a great song, whether it’s on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.
If I’m walking down the street and someone stops me and says, “Oh! A song that you wrote meant a lot to me, and I listened to it after I went to my sister’s funeral,” that’s when it hits me.
People love their favorite records. And I aspire to make a record someone might be able to love in that way.
Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign.
Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.
There’s not a lot of precedent for weird, bald musicians in the Lower East Side making records in their bedrooms and going on to sell a lot of copies of the record. Especially if you look at the pop climate.
The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be ‘eclectic.’
There are some public figures who are very private and almost hide behind their work. I try to be as open as possible.
There is a lot of music in the world that I love that does not always get the appropriate exposure.