Benny Blanco Quotes

#1. I'm not particularly good at anything. I'm not an incredible guitarist or piano player or songwriter. I think what I do is, when I notice someone is really good at something, I try to get that out of them.

Benny Blanco

#2. I just want to sound different than everyone else. I don't care if it sounds bad. I just want people to be like, 'Yo, that dude Benny was different.' Even if it sounds awful, at least they can't say, 'Oh well, I've heard that before.'

Benny Blanco

#3. Soccer was the first sport that my parents put me in, and ultimately, all the parents kind of came over to my mom and were, 'We think Channing would be better at football ... We love him, he's really great, but he's kind of hurting our children.' I was just a little wild.

Channing Tatum

#4. Is it easy for me to write from a female point of view? Yeah, I am a female. I'm a very sensitive type of guy. I try to put my female hat on and think how a female would think. If I'm watching 'The Notebook,' I'm definitely gonna cry. I cried during 'E.T.' too.

Benny Blanco

#5. Pop songs are like a D.J. set crammed into three minutes.

Benny Blanco

#6. Most of the time when people work with an artist, they don't give them what they need for the future, they give them what their last album sounded like. So it's like, 'Oh, One Republic needs a song, why don't we send them 10 that sound like 'Apologize?'

Benny Blanco

#7. I'm not a huge L.A. fan, but I go there for the winter every year. We usually rent a house and have massive house parties.

Benny Blanco

#8. Always be different; don't follow the rules. Don't do what anyone tells you. Don't use the same sounds as people; don't use the same drums as people.

Benny Blanco

#9. Sometimes stories are just previews of coming truths.

Jennifer Crusie

#10. I think somewhere along the way I realized, 'O.K., no one's gonna care about a chubby Jewish dude rapping.' I realized I'd be better behind the scenes.

Benny Blanco

#11. I used to cold call labels and pretend I was one of their artist's attorneys. I'd say, 'This is Jay-Z's attorney, we need to speak with Craig Kallman,' you know, owner of Atlantic, and they'd say, 'Right away,' and then I'd be like, 'Please just listen to my demo tape!'

Benny Blanco

#12. Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]

Cormac McCarthy

#13. Everything needs to be catchy because a listener is either going to stay with the song or lose interest in the first five seconds. But people also like those songs they can relate to and say, 'Yeah, I went through that.'

Benny Blanco

#14. I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.

John Landgraf

#15. Basically, any time you have a real life experience, that can be a song. Because no matter how crazy or weird you are, somebody's had an experience just like you, somewhere.

Benny Blanco

#16. When you're making music, it's meant to be shared with people. Sometimes, even if I'm writing a song, someone else brings a vibe. There's something different about it. If someone can play a better bassline than me, I'll let them do it. I'm just here to fit in and see where it goes.

Benny Blanco

#17. I might be eating something, and the bag opens in a cool way, and I'm like, 'I wanna put that in the song.'

Benny Blanco

#18. Are you?
What?
What you once were?
I can't remember.

Francesca Lia Block

#19. We get called dishonoring for pointing out the garbage in the church, yet nobody ever seems to think it's dishonoring that somebody put the garbage there in the first place.

D.R. Silva

#20. Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.

Madame De Stael

#21. I try to listen to over a hundred different songs a day. I listen to every single thing. If you're just listening to pop music, you're just gonna make pop music. I listen to Adele, Yo Yo Ma, Gucci Mane.

Benny Blanco

#22. Let's face it, I'm not winning a fight with anybody - unless it's against someone like Larry David.

Benny Blanco

#23. Ke$ha is her art; there is no curtain you peel back to find the real person. And with Ke$ha, you never know what to expect when you're in the studio.

Benny Blanco

#24. I actually believe that you should not wash your jeans, ever. In Japan, they actually put them in the freezer. That kills the bacteria and makes them not smell anymore.

Benny Blanco

#25. Snoopy (musing on his rooftop): Good Grief! Is it November already? My life is going by too fast. I think someone pushed the "Fast Forward" button.

Charles M. Schulz

#26. My studio's always in my house. I want to wake up and be like, 'You know I'm gonna make music today in my underwear. You know what, I'm gonna be in my pajamas. You know what, I'm actually just gonna stay inside for the next three days so I can make music.'

Benny Blanco

#27. Here's the thing ... when people start making music, they start borrowing styles from other people, because that's what you do. You start by recreating hip-hop beats you've heard from other people, or you start mimicking other people, or you're just listening to stuff.

Benny Blanco

#28. I'm not fun to bowl with. I take it way too seriously. I have high expectations for myself.

Chris Hardwick

#29. I'm not deciding what the artist is going to write about because it's the artist. They're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life. When they're old and they're 80 and they have their show in Vegas, they're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life.

Benny Blanco

#30. I can be at my house sitting there making music alone, and every single time I've ever done that the first thing I do when I'm done, no matter if it's 4 in the morning ... I literally just pick up my phone and I call someone.

Benny Blanco

#31. I don't want to make music alone in a dark studio and make me feel awful and depressed. I want to make music and feel happy and get to share it with people.

Benny Blanco

#32. Ask yourself, 'What is obstructing my vision?' What is the difference between seeing and looking?

Joshua L. Goldberg

#33. I let the song come to me. Then that thing comes to you, and you just know what that thing is. Music isn't like a 9-to-5 job. You never know. It's just the most unpredictable thing.

Benny Blanco

#34. In hip hop, it's a lot more about lacing a hot track. I start it, I help mix it, I help write it, I help produce it, I cut the person's vocals. I'm involved from the beginning to the end of a song. I'm not just giving someone a beat, you know?

Benny Blanco

#35. He decided not to try to pin her down on that; he had a feeling it was one he wouldn't win. He hadn't known Isabel Adams an hour before reaching the conclusion that she was extremely unlikely to let slip by accident anything she didn't want him to know.

Kay Hooper

#36. When you're like, 'Yo, we gotta write a hit song, we need a hit song right now,' that never works. Every time that happens, I never write a hit song.

Benny Blanco

#37. Truly great images make all the other millions of images you look at unimportant. You gotta look at an image and understand it in a nanosecond.

George Lois

#38. Maybe I didn't treat you Quite as good as I should have Maybe I didn't love you Quite as often as I could have Little things I should have said and done I just never took the time You were always on my mind You were always on my mind

Elvis Presley

#39. I am still waiting for the day that they say, 'Time's up, Blanco. Back to your shift at Walmart.'

Benny Blanco

#40. I used to link up boom boxes, record one take, play it into another boom box then play all that back into the other one until I had six tracks. It was unlistenable!

Benny Blanco