When someone comes to me and says the music I’ve made has affected them emotionally, that’s the most gratifying part of my job.
I’m not trying to look for pity or sympathy. I was just surprised that so many people in the world of entertainment seemed to be okay with misogyny and homophobia as long as they were profiting from it.
I like the humility that comes from being hated. Hopefully some humility and compassion comes out of that.
I used to have a lot of envy for those musicians who have been universally loved.
My main interest is just to work with people who have beautiful, interesting, emotive voices; I’m not too concerned whether someone is famous.
I feel like people might be slightly less inclined to hate me as much as they did in the past, and I think part of that is selling fewer records.
Never have public feuds with anyone who’s surrounded by people who carry guns.
I found it incredibly disheartening that in the late ’90s, suddenly pop culture became even more misogynistic and more homophobic, and so I criticized Eminem for having lyrics that were egregiously homophobic and egregiously misogynistic.
All I want to do with my life is try and make music that I really love, and so every day I try and work on music.
I think it’d be great if Prince made an album of just romantic, slow ballads.
To choose one type of music at the exclusion of another would feel kind of sad and arbitrary.
When I was very young, I played in a punk-rock band, but I also studied music theory and classical music.
I’ve been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band.
God took his chosen people and we are what’s left. He looked at what’s left and thought: I could kill you all, but let’s see what happens. A little social experiment.
God has taken his chosen people, the problem being you are the only non-chosen person.
There’s an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o’clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It’s off-putting but there’s a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment.
I feel like someone who’s meditating could possibly benefit their meditation practice and their well-being just by sitting down and thinking about things that they love for ten minutes.
Twin Peaks was my religion. Well, Twin Peaks and Christianity. But at present, Twin Peaks was winning. I loved God, but at the moment I was more obsessed with Bob and Dale Cooper and Audrey Horne.
It represented a world I didn’t know, the opposite of where I was – and I hated where I was. I hated the poverty, the cigarette smoke, the drug use, the embarrassment, the loneliness. And Diana Ross was promising me that there was a world that wasn’t stained with sadness and resignation. Somewhere there was a world that was sensual and robotic and hypnotic. And clean.
One cell in its unspeakable complexity would be worth the worship and awe of the entire universe. And cells were everywhere, their miraculous ness diminished only by their ubiquity.
I’d grown up with disco in the 1970s, when I just knew it as exciting pop music on AM radio. In the 1980s it died off, but still inspired everyone from New Order to Duran Duran to Kraftwerk. And then in the late 1980s the ghost of disco came back with a fury, giving birth to house music, techno, rave culture, and even a lot of hip-hop. Disco was the crucible in which most modern music had been born, and within the disco pantheon no one had ever reigned higher or more supreme than Donna Summer.