Zitat des Tages von Bryce Dessner:
I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.
Working with Bob Weir directly, we learned how high the bar is for Dead music.
My main professional experience is touring in a rock band.
To me, a song like 'Demons' or the title 'Trouble Will Find Me' are acknowledgments that you can't really plan for life, and you can't plan for trouble.
As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
Me, who's educated classically, I went toward rock music 'cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.
A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I'm in a rock band. The truth is that it's the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.
Nobody plans on playing their own songs in front of thousands of people.
For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.
My background in music is classical - I did graduate school in music. At that time, I was studying composition, but I was studying classical guitar very seriously.
I came from a classical background, and I was teaching and earning a living out of music at a certain level, so it's funny to make it as a rock star when we're 40 or whatever.
I'm not trying to take over the world, but I find it really rewarding to write, and I thrive on learning.
Art is a way of life.
There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
I think that becoming a successful rock band is a little like becoming a professional athlete. Nobody plans on it.
In terms of the music, it feels almost like trouble's a good thing - you never know when a song is going to surprise you. We look for these subversive moments in songs.
As much as you try to organize your life, life will surprise you.
I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.
I don't labour over my lead guitar solos; they're better just caught in the moment.
In terms of identity, I'm the same person no matter what I'm doing.
If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.
My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.
We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
Obviously, any living musician born after 1960 has been touched by rock and roll. It's the music of our time, and it's 'in the air,' as Steve Reich would say. My experience of it is just really direct because I'm actually playing in a collaborative band.
It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.
There are all kind of corners of the musical world that are deeply influenced by the Dead that one wouldn't expect. Lee Ranaldo is a crazy Deadhead.
You don't come to our shows if you want to look cool.
There is much more immediate access to creative music through online communities and blogs which have touched all corners of the music world including contemporary classical.
Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.
I've always been in rock bands. I was in a rock band with my brother in high school. Then I was playing classical guitar recitals, and people said, 'You know, you can't really do both things.' My intuition told me they were wrong. Somehow, what was interesting about me was that I had those two things in my life.
As long as I'm still growing as a musician, it keeps me inspired.
Typically, people think, 'Oh the hippies and the punks hated each other,' or that those things don't go together musically. Sometimes that is true, but we had equal parts of both in our musical DNA.
