Top 35 Adam Granduciel Quotes

Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.

I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I’d arrive at something too soon.

I’ve never set out to do anything other than get better at guitar and record and have fun. I feel like the Jazzmaster’s just your comrade on that journey. It can be really subtle, it can be angry, it can be chill. It can be anything.

I’ve seen people who like a certain song write on their Instagram what they think the lyrics are – which they aren’t. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting – you can create your own adventure with some of these songs.’ Which is really cool.

In terms of tone and style, I’ve always been influenced by a lot of different players. I love Nick Drake, Mike Bloomfield and Sonic Boom. I like those three a lot!

In high school, I was head of the lab. I dumped a whole five-gallon bucket of D-76 on my head once. It ruined all my clothes.

My siblings weren’t playing music; I was the only one who wanted to buy a guitar and was listening on headphones the whole time.

I love when things can repeat and you can make things slightly different each time and just react to the music and react to the recording.

All those crazy Impressionist painters in France were friends but they would write about how jealous and competitive they were. That’s what makes good art.

As he grew older, his material was just as relevant and just as exciting and the band’s just as killer… It seems surreal that there’s no more Tom Petty, in person.

The ability to work every day was a big part of L.A.’s effect on my process and the band coming out from Philly once a month.

I was a bouncer, if you can believe it for a while in a sports bar. I let everybody in.

I love playing guitar every night, and to be at this point where it’s like, the songs are done and I’m happy with the way they are on record, and I get to hear them be reinterpreted by the live band? That’s kind of the icing on the cake. It’s the best.

I don’t know what the sound is or the song is until I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I’m always chipping away at it, rethinking it.

I started guitar when I was like thirteen. I had a friend whose dad had an electric guitar. In sixth grade or seventh grade I went over and played it and immediately I was super excited by the whole thing.

With ‘Under the Pressure,’ I just found two chords I liked, and built it up, did like a ten-minute drum pattern.

I remember that in the past I was overwhelmed with the mystery of anxiety, or the mystery of depression, but now when you feel that feeling coming on you no longer go into fight-or-flight mode. You go: ‘Oh, I know what this is’ and you ride it out.

I don’t like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.

I mean, Philadelphia, if the Eagles were to win the Super Bowl, you kind of wonder how it’d change the city in some way. At the end of the day, as intense as Eagles fans are or as Philadelphia fans are, they really just love their team and they’ll be happy either way. The Eagles have made Philadelphia proud.

I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.

It was definitely strange to come home and all of a sudden have to shift gears into creative mode. I kind of had to figure out what it was about music that made it exciting, and question what it was that made it worth sacrificing all the other parts of my life that weren’t as satisfying.

It’s cool that our stuff is received as it is, and our stuff is fairly long. But from a songwriter’s purview as well as an exercise, I’m trying to write shorter material and find ways to condense ideas.

In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it’s tough to really get lost in my playing.

I’m still undisciplined in the fact that I’m not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.

I’d think the house was the source of great sadness or pressure. I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was just where I lived. But I’d walk up the stairs and the second floor was just desolate. My old bedroom: empty. My old rehearsal room: empty. First floor studio: messy and empty. Middle room: broken gear everywhere.

Somewhere between this kind of cruising freedom, and this understated moment where all these little things intertwine to create a bigger sound. You don’t want one thing to be bright, or too prevalent.

I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.

When I learning to write songs, I never really was interested in the chorus.

When you’re in the moment and not over thinking the song is when things tend to really work. You’re not so focused on the minutiae. You’re focused on the overall feel, and that’s the stuff that I get from the demos.

I try to take whatever I can from the songs I grew up listening to, these vibed-out pop numbers, and make them my own in some weird way.

Every show with my Jazzmaster is like a new show.

You can’t really take it for granted that people listen to your music. I want to write songs that are on par, at least in my mind, with the ones I’ve loved for my whole life and that will be around forever.

I ended up renting a studio in L.A. for about 15 months. Starting in January of 2016, some of the guys in the band were coming out once every five to six weeks for like five days a time.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to just be the guitar player and lose myself.

I work off of my early demos. I’ll keep adding on top of that, but I usually gravitate towards whatever that original idea was.