Annie E. Clark Quotes

#1. I think cults are probably a little less scary. To me, it's scarier that 25 people would wear robes and jump up and down and try to convert everyone to happiness than a Kool-Aid suicide.

Annie E. Clark

#2. I like to deal with my dark side in a creative way, and just sing about killing people instead of actually doing it.

Annie E. Clark

#3. I think anything that you can't poke fun at is a little too precious.

Annie E. Clark

#4. For a brief moment, I considered deconstructing the song and going down a cerebral road, but then I realized it would kill what is most powerful about it.

Annie E. Clark

#5. Putting your ego aside and confronting your weaknesses and just letting things happen is hard. Not to use a Scientology term, but it's difficult to do an emotional or an artistic audit.

Annie E. Clark

#6. Every part of every song can have a totally different musical sound, because otherwise if I wanted to go from a verse of one song to the chorus of another, I'd have to go: "Uh, okay, press that pedal and then ... press that pedal, and then press that pedal off."

Annie E. Clark

#7. I just think that the question of women in rock or women playing guitar, I just think it's such a non-issue, and I think that probably the sooner critics and press outlets can just erase the 'what's it like being a women in rock?' question from their vocabulary, the better off everyone will be.

Annie E. Clark

#8. I don't even wanna say female guitar-players, just guitar-players, because music of all things doesn't need to be gendered and stratified, that's so boring.

Annie E. Clark

#9. I'm a bit of a vagabond - a person who loses time and space because you don't know where you are.

Annie E. Clark

#10. Everybody's got a dark side, but mine doesn't include being around people who are mean.

Annie E. Clark

#11. I'd listen to things that felt really good in the moment and realize they were clouded by enthusiasm or caffeine. And things that I was struggling to get out ended up being really compelling. It's an emotional roller coaster; there's exhilaration and there's shame.

Annie E. Clark

#12. Music is kind of a strange business, and it's too weird of a job to have mean, conniving people around.

Annie E. Clark

#13. I do love the ceremony of putting on a record but I don't have space for a vinyl collection.

Annie E. Clark

#14. CDs are usually an hour long because that's the amount a CD could hold - not because that's the optimal amount of time for any given musical expression.

Annie E. Clark

#15. Checking voicemail is like, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" I'm always afraid it's going to be terrible news I don't want to hear.

Annie E. Clark

#16. I'm first and foremost a guitar player. I've been playing since I was 12, which is over half of my life.

Annie E. Clark

#17. All these things that we are very nostalgic for come from a place of technology dictating [art]. This time and place is no different.

Annie E. Clark

#18. An mp3 is a compressed form of data. It's not the full spectrum. It's never going to sound as good as a record.

Annie E. Clark

#19. I got offstage and was just looking at my hands, and they were shaking. I was like, 'I wanna kill someone! What's happening?'

Annie E. Clark

#20. There's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.

Annie E. Clark

#21. I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.

Annie E. Clark

#22. I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time.

Annie E. Clark

#23. I know that, physically, I'm a very demure-looking person. But I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow. I'm lucky that I get to play music, and that it's not going to come out in some totally destructive way.

Annie E. Clark

#24. I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.

Annie E. Clark

#25. The schematics are a little bit tricky, but once you get it down you're able to really program an entire show. Every song has a lot of different guitar sounds in it, so that's what it is.

Annie E. Clark

#26. I was like the roadie, I was carrying gear, checking things in at airports, making sure they had flowers backstage and interfacing with promoters who were sometimes really nice and sometimes a little seedy. It was a great apprenticeship, to be in the music industry.

Annie E. Clark

#27. I wanted to give the songs a run for their money, to see if they stood on their own without a lot of accoutrements. It made more sense - and it was easier, too - to go out alone and see if these songs could get in a couple of fistfights and still be standing.

Annie E. Clark

#28. I have the weirdest job. It's not every day that you get to stand up onstage and unload every ounce of your misanthropic bile onto a crowd of people, and they're like, "Cool! Hit us again!"

Annie E. Clark

#29. The most important thing is setting up these directives for yourself. Like, "I'm only going to use these three colors - go!" That's why Einstein wore the same thing every day; you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every morning.

Annie E. Clark

#30. It's pretty amazing, someone having that kind of charisma - and it still happens in micro and macro forms - to convince a whole gaggle of people to kill themselves. Or put on robes and jump up and down. That takes a very charismatic leader.

Annie E. Clark

#31. I have a phobia of checking voicemail. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and everything is, like, you're gonna get kidnapped, or somebody's gonna die, or killer bees are going to take you out. I'm a very anxious person.

Annie E. Clark

#32. What I did with my first records was, my writing process was that I didn't touch any instruments to write it, so I was making it all on the computer, and really the arrangements were coming first, the intricate thing.

Annie E. Clark