Beck Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

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

There's never any pressure on the music having to be something.

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?

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

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

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

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.

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

Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.

I had long hair when I was a teenager.

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.

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.

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.

In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments.

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.

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

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

Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

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.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air.

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.

There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.

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.

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

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial.

I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense.

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

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.

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.

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. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.

When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.

There are plenty of Minutemen. People willing to be Minutemen. Where are the people that want to be George Washington? Where are the Benjamin Franklins? Where is Sam Adams? Where is John Adams?

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.

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.

For the records I've work on over the last 10 years, I get sent the really compressed version and the non-compressed version, and oftentimes you end up going with the more compressed one because it's what people's ears are attuned to. I think the bigger problem is saturation and people being desensitized.

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.

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

You spend so many months and years in the studio, and you see the clock ticking and so much time spent on the minutiae of technical things. And I just thought it'd be fun to do something extremely fast and get that rush of something that had some energy, something that you weren't tired of when you finished it.

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced.

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

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

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.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it.

It gets a little bit troublesome when you have something that's overcompressed that shouldn't be.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

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.

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic.

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

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.

When I did "Top of the Pops" for the first time, Ace of Base was one of the other bands, and I have a memory of them on a small stage next to me in the TV studio. A memory of their performance is burned into my mind. Seared.

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.

I remember you would record a guitar part, and we would have to sit there for 15 or 20 minutes waiting for the computer to process it. You'd see the little wheel spinning on the computer, and you'd be praying that the hard drive didn't crash and you didn't lose the performance.

When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.