Top 87 Stephen Malkmus Quotes
#1. I've wanted to not play as much. I would like to just sing now. Even though I don't think I'm a great singer, I wouldn't mind just - not being a frontman, per se, but singing and not playing.
Stephen Malkmus
#2. I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.
Stephen Malkmus
#3. You know, the songs that are self-conscious or jerky, they are that way, but the other ones aren't, so that's a good thing. Some of the songs are Beck-jokey, but the others, they have heart in them.
Stephen Malkmus
#4. Almost every band has somebody who's the main songwriter and who has a vision, a very clear idea of how a song should be.
Stephen Malkmus
#5. When I see four young kids in a band, I think, That looks really fun, no matter how shitty they are. You develop your own thing, and get excited about your band name. It's all so harmless.
Stephen Malkmus
#7. There's something in life that's cool, it's relatively cheap, and fun, and populist. Even when it's elitist.
Stephen Malkmus
#8. It's normally in the morning, just playing around. And I'm not saying everything I make is great, but that's what I do. I can't even remember how I wrote stuff.
Stephen Malkmus
#9. I would just imagine there's a criticism for just about everything, if you want to take something down. No one's invincible. The Jicks are a work in progress and we don't think everything we do is the bee's knees or something, we're just trying our best to get turned on by what we're doing.
Stephen Malkmus
#10. My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
Stephen Malkmus
#11. If a voice is just too nice, without an edge, it kinda all flows by. You forget it. You don't listen to the lyrics.
Stephen Malkmus
#12. I think the focus of the media changes. At the moment the more electronic stuff like trip-hop was the flavor of the month, just a little while ago. It all depends on the angle, from which point of view you see it.
Stephen Malkmus
#13. [As a frontman ] I'm going to wear leather pants and get blowjobs in the studio. That would be nice. They are definitely not cool, but I like them. I don't listen to them, but I like them when I hear them on the radio, normally.
Stephen Malkmus
#14. I don't know if you look back on your life and just see successes, but probably the first things that pop up are the regrets.
Stephen Malkmus
#15. I just don't think people listen. I mean, they can't listen to a whole album closely without checking their iPhone or wanting to skip to their favorite song, or putting something else on, practically. That's why the zone out is a good thing.
Stephen Malkmus
#16. Despite my own doubts of being marketable or crushworthy, my goal was to write a record of peppy pop songs, hopefully without annoying anybody.
Stephen Malkmus
#17. I'm better when I'm an autodidact and things just come. Or you're just blessed. I'm not bragging or anything, it just comes to you.
Stephen Malkmus
#18. I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.
Stephen Malkmus
#20. I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
Stephen Malkmus
#21. Well, yeah, I sang to some songs on the radio or in the shower.
Stephen Malkmus
#22. We [ Paverment] were definitely unafraid of playing wrong notes and singing wrong things. We could be fearlessly bad!
Stephen Malkmus
#23. That's why you go to a nice studio. You can get a magic take. You don't really have to do anything to it.
Stephen Malkmus
#24. There's no point that an album should sound like a watered down version of another album.
Stephen Malkmus
#25. Men are men and women are women, but the men are dumber than the women, usually.
Stephen Malkmus
#26. When I was in high school, I was a late bloomer. And just like all those supermodels who said they were gawky and no one liked them, that was me - metaphorically. And so I was ready to rise like a phoenix in later times.
Stephen Malkmus
#27. When a band means a lot to you, you build the fantasy more than the reality. Always.
Stephen Malkmus
#28. If you have no shame, and it's your goal to get people into bed, how much higher could your success rate possibly be?
Stephen Malkmus
#29. If someone's really busy listening to other CDs, and worried about what's new and what's truly relevant for discourse now, maybe it isn't that interesting. To me it is, because I'm tuned into that and that's what I like, so it's interesting to me. It's all I can do.
Stephen Malkmus
#30. Something taken off the page can sound great, I guess. Usually it doesn't. It seems like lately Pitchfork is trying to champion lyric writers more.
Stephen Malkmus
#31. My wife says that I changed people's lives or ways of thinking and that I should always be proud and grateful. If I'm dismissive of what we do sometimes, a little bit, she's like, "I was a fan, you changed my life," or whatever. That's what she says.
Stephen Malkmus
#32. I thought The Doors were the greatest band for a while.
Stephen Malkmus
#33. We're not on a desperate mission to write chart compatible stuff.
Stephen Malkmus
#34. I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don't come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can't do a riff album. I'm more of a song, melody person.
Stephen Malkmus
#35. Family is the best. I can honestly say, it's a gift that is beyond making art. I didn't know that when I got into it.
Stephen Malkmus
#36. I like that band Get Hustle. They're cool live. I haven't heard their records, though.
Stephen Malkmus
#37. Maybe I don't have the patience to make a virtue of necessity - the patience to carry something all the way through, and to actually say something. Lately, the songs are more jagged and they don't really lend themselves to that. I just take it one bit at a time.
Stephen Malkmus
#38. There's probably a certain confidence in your voice, or something, that is validated. You know what I mean? I'm just imagining if people didn't already say that you were cool, that you'd [have] more doubt in what you're doing. That's not so conscious, but that's part of my cosmology now.
Stephen Malkmus
#39. But, then again, I wouldn't call myself an indie-rock supporter even if there are some really good bands out there and there will always be some real good new bands.
Stephen Malkmus
#41. Lou Reed is something like a personal favorite of mine, but you could always put me into that drawer of singers who can't really sing, who speak their songs.
Stephen Malkmus
#42. Lyrics are back, maybe. It seems like there was a bit of an attitude that lyrics are not important.
Stephen Malkmus
#43. I think it's just entertainment for people that are interested in the form. To sing along to and be psyched by.
Stephen Malkmus
#44. We were delighted to have Nigel as a producer. The only problem is that Nigel is so famous that he seems to dominate most interviews without being there.
Stephen Malkmus
#45. Besides, going on tour and playing songs and arranging things, going to practice, it's all I know to be productive.
Stephen Malkmus
#46. I'm thinking, I'm singing like Ozzy Osbourne, but I don't sound like him enough, ever.
Stephen Malkmus
#47. I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
Stephen Malkmus
#48. Well, you know, it's a younger person, and it was maybe an effort to be a little more sincere and adult about the lyrics occasionally, which is a good thing. It's nice that it's not too self-conscious like some of our lyrics could be.
Stephen Malkmus
#49. Usually [the lyrics] go from one word to the next word - there's no finish line. The music was that way, too.
Stephen Malkmus
#50. There's no reason to stop. Who knows what's around the bend? To participate, meet new people. It's mostly other musicians and people like you, or anybody I meet who's in this, that keeps me going.
Stephen Malkmus
#51. The word "down," is very musical. It just always comes.
Stephen Malkmus
#52. Most people want to be seen or heard. You want to shine. That's my way of shining.
Stephen Malkmus
#53. I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.
Stephen Malkmus
#54. Like the song "Stereo", to me that's like, kind of hip-hop in that slacker way. There's some slackerisms mixed in with that stuff, but it wasn't really conscious, I guess. When things would get more typical rock'n'roll that was my fallback to go to those kind of lyrics instead of the alternatives.
Stephen Malkmus
#55. If you'd rather learn how to ride a horse or something, I would say do that. That'll keep you out of trouble. You would think a band would get you in trouble, but I think it's the opposite.
Stephen Malkmus
#56. George Oppen wasn't a larger than life personality, but I'm not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too.
Stephen Malkmus
#57. With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that.
Stephen Malkmus
#58. Don't go to the same studio twice, or work with the same engineer twice.
Stephen Malkmus
#59. The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative.
Stephen Malkmus
#60. I didn't really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny.
Stephen Malkmus
#61. Some people, they've had a lot of fun, even if it was dumb fun and a shitty body of work.
Stephen Malkmus
#62. Things tends to often [consolidate] like Disney. It's the same with music. There's Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and Patti Smith. There's these three people that everyone seems to agree on. No matter what they like, they seem to like those three.
Stephen Malkmus
#63. When I was a kid I really liked the guitarist of The Doors [Robby Krieger]. He plays blues, but he plays a lot of melodic things. He plays scales that are kind of unusual, and some bent notes.
Stephen Malkmus
#64. So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics."
Stephen Malkmus
#65. I just imagine that every song in and of itself is great, but when you add them all up, it's too much of me maybe.
Stephen Malkmus
#67. You don't realize that when you're young, and you're surprised there's a lot of people at your gig - you just think it's general British-press hype.
Stephen Malkmus
#68. Basically, no one else gives me any opinions on lyrics. I don't ask for them. If they did, I would listen.
Stephen Malkmus
#69. But we're still rehearsing and planning to make a new album next year. We have some really good new songs that we've already been playing on that last tour that we just finished.
Stephen Malkmus
#70. The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.
Stephen Malkmus
#71. We're probably a couple of freaks who've created their own little universe, are living in our own little world and that's the only place where we can survive.
Stephen Malkmus
#72. If there can be some paradigm shift thing that you can be part of, that's cool.
Stephen Malkmus
#73. A good voice isn't so important. It's more important to sound really unique.
Stephen Malkmus
#74. It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.
Stephen Malkmus
#75. If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.
Stephen Malkmus
#76. The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.
Stephen Malkmus
#79. What I love about music, when you can look at something and be like, "Wow, what's this all about?" You can't really picture what these people look like - is it one guy, or a band making music in a garage?
Stephen Malkmus
#80. I still hate [the Eagles] ... . There's levels of evil in it to me.
Stephen Malkmus
#81. There's always a chance, a goal to make something different and get it right, finally.
Stephen Malkmus
#82. What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.
Stephen Malkmus
#83. I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.
Stephen Malkmus
#84. I did some writing. I was just taking the kids to school. I did a couple things and we did some tours. It was a lot of downtime.
Stephen Malkmus
#86. I'm not dying for everyone to hear everything we do. Forty minutes every two years is sensible.
Stephen Malkmus
#87. I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.
Stephen Malkmus
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