Damian Kulash Quotations

We have a lot of fun. We play a lot of rock songs and yes, we're going to dance for you.

We wanted to make an album that sounds like our band, and not a heady, self-conscious studio project. Everyone tells us rock and roll is a shadow of itself--a sad old milk cow smiling at the farmer every morning. We still see a bucking bull smashing around the stable.

To me this album seems more energetic and raw, with more space unlike the first one, which was about stacking up 50 guitars and 80 backing vocals on each track,

We basically practiced it at our house for a week. And my sister, who is a dancer, helped choreograph it for our live show, ... We taped us doing it in the backyard not to use as our own video, but because we wanted to show the dance to a video director for this other idea we had that involved choreography to prove to him we were the band to do it. It turns out the director never even got it.

I like shooting things in single takes. You have to rely on the idea itself to carry the full weight; you're always watching the idea, not the filmmaking.

It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.

Everyone loves the idea of internet fast enough that HD movies download in seconds, but if only the telecoms or their partners get to use the high speeds, it's not the internet: It's glorified cable.

What we did is we went on those parabolic flights, which people like to call the vomit comet. Basically, the plane throws you up into the air and catches you. And for about 30 seconds, you feel like there's no gravity. So what we did was we did a series of eight of those in a row. And every time we landed, we stayed perfectly still for the five minutes in between while the plane is setting up so that we could just continue the routine where we had left off. So the final video you see is all one take. And we seem to be weightless the entire time.

I will say that the lead cosmonaut trainer - I mean, we were working with professional cosmonaut trainers outside of Moscow. And the lead one, at the end of the project, announced to the entire group that he wanted Trish [Sie] to be on his team forevermore.

A lot of things get made this way: someone imagines what they want to make, then very carefully plans every step of the process, then sets about making it. That's usually the efficient, reasonable way to get something done, but it limits you to ideas you can think of in advance.

For me, it works best to plan just enough to come up with a good direction to head out in. Then I start down the path as soon as I can, without a very clear idea of what exactly I'm going to end up with. I try to leave a lot of time for flexibility and play and changing direction.

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance.

David Foster Wallace is a big idol of mine. His writing is so clear that for years I'd read him and think, My God, he is actually writing the way I think. He's describing the thoughts in my head. And then I realized, No, wait. He's just such a good writer, so transparent and articulate, that when he describes his thoughts, I think they're my own.

I'm passionate about music, food, books, film, blah, blah. The same things everyone is passionate about, no? Love, sex, connection. Peace. Not f - - g up our planet.

Actually, here is something I'm passionate about that, looking around me, seems like the world at large must not care about as much as I do: craft.

I can't stand things that are poorly made or shoddily conceived. I feel like I'm being insulted when something is poorly designed, poorly made. It's like whoever made that thing didn't respect the rest of us enough to do it well.

I can't imagine everyone on the planet would want to hear something from me. If I thought they'd listen, I'd probably ask them to try to be nicer to each other, to try to be less scared of their differences.

If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed.

I can have fairly crippling self-criticism. It doesn't really put me in a vulnerable state, I just get glum and intolerable, but it certainly is a vulnerability.

What puts me in a vulnerable state? Beauty, wonder, surprise, mystery. Stuff like that.

I'm very active in pushing for net neutrality and an open Internet. There are countless other causes I support personally and privately, but I try to keep my public activism fairly focused.

I think that artists and musicians can do as much harm as good for causes if they tie their names to lots of things, especially if they aren't really doing much to meaningfully push their causes forward.

If you have a lot of fans, you have a powerful soapbox, but you still have to have something to say when you're on that soapbox if you want to make a real difference.

There’s no hope of people paying attention to your music video if you don’t let others use it,

We don't want to be the kind of band that requires a lot of massive, corporate dollars to keep us running and promoted. We're trying to build a fan base and community that listens to us and the best way to do that is to tour - we go out and we play and we play and we play and we meet the people that like us and we try to keep the whole thing organic.

You have 20 years to write your first record and only six months to do the next one. So people often just completely fold under the pressure. I'm much more proud of our second record than our first, so I'm happy to hear that people are responding to it well. We sort of cheated in that there were almost three years in between both records.

It's not like a challenge to the Stones, but more of a revision, ... Tim was playing this riff and he needed it to feel sleazy and dark, and I was trying to figure out what it was about. I remembered the time Tim and I first made a concerted effort to write songs together five or six years ago when we took a week off and drove to New Hampshire. I remember on this 18-hour car ride, being way over-caffeinated and buzzing, I realized that I was trying to figure out if you would know if you were the devil. I got Tim to quit his job for a week and go to this cabin, which seemed like the sort of thing the devil would do.