Zach Condon Quotes

#1. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

Zach Condon

#2. I like to think that location, travel, etc, is a launching point for purely imagining.

Zach Condon

#3. I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else - I can't really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.

Zach Condon

#4. In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's worth owning.

Zach Condon

#5. Often when I find myself listening to music, at least 60 to 70% of it is foreign, so I don't understand a word of it. Melody to me will always be a million times more important than words.

Zach Condon

#6. In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin.

Zach Condon

#7. I'm not an amazing trumpet player. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. You shake the trumpet and it starts to vibrate in a ridiculous drunken way, or you flop notes at the right time and you don't have to play stuff that would take seven years to learn.

Zach Condon

#8. I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.

Zach Condon

#9. I think that there's a proliferation of music that is done entirely in the bedroom for an Internet audience, but there's no way in hell that you could actually kill off a live show, and its importance in the creation of music - it's just impossible.

Zach Condon

#10. You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that's really vague, but it's true.

Zach Condon

#11. I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.

Zach Condon

#12. It's a natural tendency of mine to not even listen to lyrics.

Zach Condon

#13. I think that within the world of music that we work in, which is so not perfect, I think that you really do have to learn to accept your own mistakes as part of the beauty of music itself.

Zach Condon

#14. I'm swept along by larger forces out of my control.

Zach Condon

#15. I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.

Zach Condon

#16. I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.

Zach Condon

#17. I'm very flash and burn - the first thing that comes to mind is obviously the best idea, and that's because it should come out of a natural place, and if you don't do that then you're writing someone else's music, not your own.

Zach Condon

#18. I try to shut my brain down as much as possible. And let the melodies flow, if possible.

Zach Condon

#19. There is a beauty to touring - to be honest, there's a way that music connects and you really feel the actual reaction of people to the music that you're making, and I feel like if I didn't do that I just wouldn't know, and I don't think my music would be the same.

Zach Condon

#20. It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'

Zach Condon

#21. I write one step at a time, always finishing off the part I'm working on before even thinking about the next part. I need to hear it all together before deciding what goes next. I even mix before moving on ... in other words, I write by recording.

Zach Condon

#22. I'd been living out of a suitcase since I was 17 years old, and it just got to the point where it was ridiculous. Besides, it was really hurting everything I was trying to do in music; to feel so consistently homeless was no way to endure touring and stress.

Zach Condon

#23. The more I know, the more I realise I don't know. And the more I realise I'll never truly understand.

Zach Condon

#24. I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was ... New York.

Zach Condon

#25. I think, if I had my choice, I would spend all my time in the studio writing, and creating music.

Zach Condon

#26. I fell off a bridge when I was 14, then had surgery when I was 17. Now my left wrist is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my [right one] and doesn't quite have the mobility to wrap around a guitar neck without a bit of pain.

Zach Condon

#27. I dropped out of high school and I tried to go to community college for a little while. I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.

Zach Condon

#28. I love the community and the entertainment too much. I'm used to it - it's what I saw first.

Zach Condon

#29. I just reached the point where I realised, I need to stop repeating myself if I'm ever actually going to enjoy the music I'm creating.

Zach Condon

#30. I think it's become much harder because I'm more afraid of every step I take. I'm more aware of its ramifications, I'm more aware of the less creative aspects of music - like the business-side of things for example.

Zach Condon

#31. I was a very good student until about sophomore year, and that's when I just became so disillusioned with the whole thing that I just became an awful student. I was still making good grades. But I was cutting class three days a week and faking papers that I got off the internet.

Zach Condon

#32. As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

Zach Condon

#33. When I came back to America, I realized that world music is no joke, it really has a lot to it.

Zach Condon

#34. I spent my entire life working with the smallest budget I could get. Just working with old, junky, donated equipment. The only things I bought myself were the trumpet and the $9 ukulele.

Zach Condon

#35. After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there's this new generation of voices that are really starting to burst through the seams.

Zach Condon

#36. I put myself in the studio and I really made sure to say, 'Well, if I would normally reach for a trumpet, why don't I reach for the next nearest instrument instead?'

Zach Condon

#37. My thought with harmonies and melodies in general, is that if it doesn't come right away then it's never going to come at all.

Zach Condon

#38. I think I spent more time on the mellotron than on any other instrument in the studio, and it got to the point where I was like, "Well, you can't write an entire album on this instrument." But maybe I would!

Zach Condon

#39. As much as I try to grow as a lyricist, I tend to laugh at even calling myself that, because I think that my actual talents lie more in arrangements than they do words.

Zach Condon

#40. Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

Zach Condon

#41. My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

Zach Condon

#42. I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.

Zach Condon

#43. The way Jacques Brel writes a story, getting into the character, bringing out all his faults and qualities in the same song ... Not that I could ever write in such an epic way, but it really is a different way to go about writing lyrics ... and I find that quite inspiring.

Zach Condon