Top 44 Beck Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I love British humor. It’s just so – surreal.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t want to do something typical.

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

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.

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.

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.

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

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.

I had long hair when I was a teenager.