Words matter. These are the best Aaron Dessner Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Music for me is an emotional necessity. It’s therapy. It’s what I live and breathe.
There’s no one songwriter in the band. It’s collaborative, and we all have different tastes.
Seven’ is this kind of nostalgic, emotional folk song.
I’m probably more obsessed with football that I am with music.
And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.
But I’d say recording and playing on stage are two completely different things. Being up there in front of all those people is like jumping off a cliff into icy water. The recording process is a totally different energy.
I’m very fortunate and grateful to wake up every morning in the rural countryside I live in, looking at farmland and these beautiful mountains.
It’s actually not that hard to play guitar in a rock band.
Big Red Machine is really a community effort: I guess it involves almost 30 musicians. It does come out of our friendship, but it’s really something that is deeply collaborative.
There have definitely been phases of the National, many years ago, where we did party, and various people, in their own way, fell off the wagon.
I do have a way of playing piano where it’s very melodic and emotional, but then often it’s great if whoever’s singing doesn’t sing exactly what’s in the piano melody, but maybe it’s connected in some way.
Anyone who’s speaking up about anything becomes a target.
There are some things that you see that are hard to talk about. You can’t talk about it. You just bear witness to them.
Whenever I write anything, I do sing to it, to try and make sure it’s interesting or compelling to sing to. I’ve gotten in the habit of sharing that with other, more charismatic vocalists.
The great thing about being on tour is that… the band plays at night and other than that we have a lot of free time.
Our recordings, you feel that it’s been, not labored, but you feel that it’s been constructed in a way where sometimes it’s hard for us to create the feeling that this was done in a room.
For whatever reason, you gravitate to certain subjects, and I read a lot of history.
It’s very exciting to have a festival in the heart of Boston. It’s an amazing experience to be in a city and to be able to walk in and out of a festival. I think that’s part of what’s going to make Boston Calling really special.
I guess I like minor chords better than major ones, in general.
I think for me to be involved in a festival, there has to be a strong element of songwriting and musicianship.
After years of touring you experience music festivals that are mostly the same – where you copy and paste the same experience into a muddy field in California or a muddy field in England.
I grew up fly fishing when I was a kid. The feeling of it is fun. I went fly-fishing on Lake Delaware once, and I caught a record brook trout.
White people need to wake up and tell the truth about US history and the inequality and the ways in which racism is so entrenched.
There are people who want to hear what they consider your hits. There are people who want you to experiment and explore random, rare things. And it’s kind of a different; they’re two different beasts.
Our writing, especially during ‘Boxer’ – the recording process was the writing process, which is not the way I would advise anyone else to do it.
My wife is from Copenhagen and her father has been a huge Liverpool supporter since the early 1960s.
From the very beginning, we just sort of made things up together. That’s one of the great things about having a twin brother; you have a sort of feedback loop, where you can bounce things off of each other.
I kind of love opening, because it’s easier and kind of just more fun to get up and play fast and furious and have a good time.
One of the hardest things about being a musician is finishing a project and then having to wait three or six months to publish it and to do all the sort of promotional behaviour.
Die Like a Rich Boy’ has, for me, some of the strongest lyrical content I’ve heard in many years; an epic love song laced with dark imagery and acerbic social criticism.
If I’m not working on music, I’m probably torturing my infant daughter, Ingrid, with kisses or running or playing soccer in the park.
David Longstreth is one of the great guitar heroes of our generation.
Sometimes my brother and I – we’re twins, and sometimes we joke that we’re like a two-headed monster. We can be hard to deal with because we don’t break ranks; we stick together.
I had been living with my family in France as COVID was starting to spiral out of control in Europe. I said to my wife that maybe they should come back to the States with me because I was worried about getting separated.
When you’re working with someone new, it takes a second to understand their instincts and range. It’s not really conscious.
