J. Tillman Song Quotations

With sad music, or music that's perceived as sad, there's a sense of solidarity that can be really powerful. My songs are all joyful to me.

I don't feel any obligation to make my intentions for a song accessible to a listener or an audience. I'm not interested in conveying anything to them so much as what's best for me.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.

I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it's completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.

I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.

I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.