I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.
Music can always serve a role in people’s lives when it’s emotional and warm and inviting and beautiful.
Sit down, close your eyes, and think about dogs for ten minutes. On a very clear, physiological, and neurochemical level, your body is changed by these really positive thoughts.
The moment that you impose your will on another person or animal, that’s when we are allowed to say you have committed an ethical breach.
I always just made music that resonates with me emotionally.
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.