Zitat des Tages von Beck:
I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial.
I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose.
I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.
Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
I didn't want to do something typical.
There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.
When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.
It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out.
I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense.
I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.
I would love to do an electronic record. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by.
Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.
Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side.
If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about?
There's never any pressure on the music having to be something.
I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.
I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.
Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.
I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.
I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most.
Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know.
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air.
The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.
Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig.
In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I'm not technically a rapper, whatever that means.
Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.
You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.
I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.
There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.
I had long hair when I was a teenager.
In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs.