Beck Quotes

#1. 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.

Beck

#2. I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve.

Beck

#3. If we look at the fact that record covers are essentially advertisements for the music, we acknowledge a function and purpose to draw in the prospective buyer.

Beck

#4. 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.

Beck

#5. I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002.

Beck

#6. I've been practicing for years, trying to figure out how to record an entire band live.

Beck

#7. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact.

Beck

#8. I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by.

Beck

#9. 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.

Beck

#10. You must see yourself as guardian, somebody who will preserve what is true and pass it on. Be a guardian. We don't need militants or revolutionaries. We need guardians. We need leaders.

Beck

#11. I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.

Beck

#12. 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.

Beck

#13. I enjoy recording live better, but I think by the nature of it you are going to end up with something that's a little bit more traditional.

Beck

#14. Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.

Beck

#15. To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.

Beck

#16. In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

Beck

#17. You're just the girl of my dreams
But it seems my dreams never come true

Beck

#18. 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.

Beck

#19. Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Beck

#20. No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

Beck

#21. Sometimes, I think the way the music business has been destructive and the way the fans are been put through it and try to navigate through it, so much is so foreign to what musicians would actually want to do or what would be natural to them.

Beck

#22. Back then, Pro Tools only had four or eight tracks, so we couldn't actually hear all the tracks. We could only hear eight at a time, so if a song had 25 or 30 tracks, we wouldn't be able to hear it until we went into the studio an put it all on tape. The process was a little bit backwards.

Beck

#23. I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible.

Beck

#24. I'm a musician. I'm not, like, a personality. I've never really pretended to perform that kind of function.

Beck

#25. You just want to go back to those 70s albums. Even a lot of the 90s indie records were still done on tape, and you hear the difference.

Beck

#26. 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.

Beck

#27. 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.

Beck

#28. [Early on,] the attitude was that what I was doing wasn't music.

Beck

#29. I sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.

Beck

#30. I always loved art shows at schools. My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It's some of my favorite art ... It's more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.

Beck

#31. When you say 'state' you mean 'national.' National Socialism. That is what Mussolini and Hitler did. National Socialism. State Capitalism. They've changed the name.

Beck

#32. I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music.

Beck

#33. Whatever you do has to be commercial and it can't be too distracting - it has to be background music, basically.

Beck

#34. There's a perception that if an artist produces another artist, they're going to imprint on them. But I'm the opposite.

Beck

#35. What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give.

Beck

#36. Set your guitars and banjos on fire and before you write a song smoke a pack of whiskey and it'll all take care of itself.

Beck

#37. I've said for years to wives and mothers, you must start to see yourself as Sarah Connor. You must equip your children with the information they need to survive an ever-changing world.

Beck

#38. 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.

Beck

#39. With modern recording techniques, and living in the Pro Tools era, the process gets really drawn-out, and it can become painstaking.

Beck

#40. If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated.

Beck

#41. When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the '50s/'60s generation was so dominant.

Beck

#42. It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.

Beck

#43. We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.

Beck

#44. Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

Beck

#45. I know my own limitations. And if somebody says, "I need songs for a cartoon garage band - they look like this and they should sound like this," it gives you a direction. I like having that kind of assignment.

Beck

#46. You can't write if you can't relate.

Beck

#47. It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out.

Beck

#48. I'm always working on my own music, too. I've been working on a record for a few years.

Beck

#49. When I pull out vinyl - which isn't that often anymore - it's undeniable that I get a different feeling. There's a different physiology happening between the sound waves and the body that doesn't happen with music playing off the computer.

Beck

#50. Somebody else is satisfied by five Bentleys. I'm satisfied by a beautiful string arrangement.

Beck

#51. There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing.

Beck

#52. The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing.

Beck

#53. I didn't go to high school. I never felt connected to people my age.

Beck

#54. There's more well-known artists who aren't making as good songs as people who are just coming out of nowhere. That seems to be more typical in the last few years than ever.

Beck

#55. 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?

Beck

#56. I had long hair when I was a teenager.

Beck

#57. Let the desert wind cool your aching head. Let the weight of the world - drift away instead

Beck

#58. You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you'll start walking pretty weird.

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#59. Originally, the lyrics to "Girl" were really upbeat, and then it didn't work for me somehow. You need the dichotomy. If you're doing something happy and light, you need the shadows.

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#60. I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it's usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank.

Beck

#61. There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.

Beck

#62. I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose.

Beck

#63. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music.

Beck

#64. 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.

Beck

#65. I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

Beck

#66. Good Old Socialism ... Raping The Pocketbooks Of The Rich To Give To The Poor.

Beck

#67. I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

Beck

#68. I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys.

Beck

#69. The only way I was allowed to play was by convincing bands to let me do a few songs while they set up. That went on for years.

Beck

#70. There's an infinite amount of possibilities and detours and things that can distract you from actually just performing the song and having whatever emotion that's invested into the song come through in the recording.

Beck

#71. 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.

Beck

#72. Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig.

Beck

#73. There are certain records that you love because the songs are great, but you don't go to them as an example of great production.

Beck

#74. Your heart is a drum keeping time with everyone.

Beck

#75. I have for four years now been ringing the bell. Economic Holocaust is coming. Economic day of reckoning is coming.

Beck

#76. Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.

Beck

#77. As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.

Beck

#78. I would love to do an electronic record. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by.

Beck

#79. I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

Beck

#80. There are certain songs that just stick around and do something that transcends whatever time they were written in. Through different eras, people are able to impart different meaning to the song, and they become part of some sort of consciousness.

Beck

#81. I try not to do email; I try to talk to people on the phone.

Beck

#82. I love British humor. It's just so - surreal.

Beck

#83. There are people who've prepared their whole lives for real heavy success and bask in it. They're so good at it and they obviously love it. I'm just happy to be making a record.

Beck

#84. Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz.

Beck

#85. 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.

Beck

#86. Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.

Beck

#87. Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman.

Beck

#88. The limitations are limitless.

Beck

#89. With my own music, I try to get away from things that are familiar and things that would be easy for me to go to.

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#90. It's so easy to criticize your own time, and I see that as a problem, even for myself, as a listener.

Beck

#91. I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded.

Beck

#92. I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.

Beck

#93. Sometimes, reissues can be revelatory, or put the original record in a different light, but those are rare.

Beck

#94. When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.

Beck

#95. I'm sure the music is going to come out. I'm not sure if I'm going to put out 12s or put the songs on my website. I just have to get them done.

Beck

#96. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

Beck

#97. 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.

Beck

#98. Whether you're aware of it or not, any kind of collage idea becomes a part of how you see the world once you incorporate media and internet and video games and all these things.

Beck

#99. I don't remember half of the new bands, though - and I think that's kind of where we're going. It's turning into just a big derby of songs. May the best song win.

Beck

#100. 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.

Beck