Top 55 Rostam Batmanglij Quotes

I never identified with ‘indie,’ I don’t like that word.

I was listening ‘Plastic Ono Band,’ the John Lennon album a lot, and that might have had some inspiration on me.

The thing I love about car design is that it’s sculpture everybody appreciates, everybody has access to.

It’s easier for me to remember things based on the releases of albums. The year is such an arbitrary thing.

I never felt like there were things I couldn’t express lyrically in Vampire Weekend. I was always proud of everything that we wrote together.

I love being able to record in a room that’s surrounded by trees.

Honestly, I never felt like I wasn’t an artist on my own. I always felt like the music I made was mine, whether it was part of a collaboration with people.

In the West we are constantly hit with music of Middle Eastern descent signifying terror, intrigue or sorrow.

My music is about identity.

It doesn’t matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend’s house. Now it’s more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

I’ll probably continue writing songs about New York until I die.

It’s interesting because neither of my parents play instruments. They both love music, but neither of them are musicians. Somehow, I was drawn to it.

I think as a producer, you’re always sort of questioning if what you’re contributing is something that an artist loves and elevates a song.

I work on music with different people, and I work on music on my own. That’s my life.

I think that for a lot of us gay people, we do feel that pop is our music. We identify with it and its iconography, and that’s been a tradition.

What I love is the openness of collaboration.

I want to live in a world that is less white supremacist, straight supremacist, male supremacist.

On the song ‘Step,’ the chorus is Ezra is singing into my laptop with the laptop microphone, and you can hear the trains going by my apartment, but we liked the quality of that recording.

Radio or no radio, I just like the way records sound when the drums and vocals are loud.

I don’t believe in expertise. I don’t believe that a film critic feels a film more deeply than any person who walks into a theater. I don’t believe that.

Classical music can be catchy, so can African instrumental guitar music. It’s not just pop songs that are catchy. Rhythms can be catchy, too.

I can’t even begin to express the joy I get from writing songs, both on my own and with others, I hold it all sacred.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They’ve never contended with anything but visibility.

I think that’s kind of the perfect mix, where you do something that you’re not sure about, you feel like you’re taking a risk, and then you turn around and look at the artists that you’re collaborating with and you can read the expression on their face if they like it or they hate it.

Well, I think that I have a complicated relationship with whiteness because oftentimes, I pass as white, and I recognize that. I would be disingenuous to pretend that I don’t pass as white.

I think when I work with artists, I’m at their service, and I’m at the service of either their vision or a vision that we find together and we share.

Sometimes the hangover provides inspiration.

The first Vampire Weekend record was the first full-length album that I produced.

A lot of what being a producer is, is giving people space. Like psychologically being there to help them realize what they’re trying to do.

Shangri-La is one of the few studios in which you can sit in the control room and open a window behind you. You can feel the light and the air coming off the ocean. You can have a musical world in front of you and the natural world behind you.

I don’t think teenagers in 2017 identify with heterosexuality, and that’s a positive.

I guess my first instrument was the recorder when I was about five or six.

I started playing guitar when I was 14.

I’d like to make an album with Slack one day. I’d like to use it as a collaborative tool. I know about it because I have friends that work in tech, and I guess you can use it in any job.

I tend to use different microphones, different mic techniques, and different recording mediums – like analogue tape – that evoke multiple eras of recorded music at the same time.

I thought it would be interesting to play classical music on rock instruments.

When my mom was pregnant with me, my parents moved from France to America.

When I moved to New York, I remember thinking, ‘I’m never going to live anywhere else.’

I’ve had experiences where my life will try to tell me something in a dream and sometimes it’s something I’m not ready to hear.

I think that all music is inherently political, and, at the same time, I’m interested in the politics of inclusion not exclusion. So I think that my goal is to make music that anybody can hear and feel moved by.

I figured out that it was important for me to have my identity, just live independently and like being myself, musically.

When I work with other artists, I really want to bring out the most in their voices and I want to hold myself to the same standard.

I think the music that speaks to me the most is music that is personal. And that’s the music that I’m trying to make.

I like there to be some secrets.

I can pass as a lot of things: people meet me and don’t think I’m gay and speak about gay people in a certain way or they don’t know I’m Middle Eastern and do the same.

A lot of people get a high from being onstage. I found ways to enjoy it. But I get it from being in the studio.

I always want to be somewhat uncomfortable. But at the same time I want to make music that you react to viscerally.

I don’t identify as white. I have a complex relationship with whiteness.

When an old tape machine makes pitch wobble, some people would say that compromises fidelity and would try to get rid of it. But to me that wobble adds richness, it instantly brings back the feelings you associate with old recordings.

I’m very conscious of the fact that I devoted my life to recording music, recordings and writing songs.

I think that’s the only way I know how to write songs, is to think about my life, and also to think about the words at the same time.

It’s always my mission to try to do something that hasn’t been done before, whether that’s musically, lyrically or in terms of mixing.

I’d like to release solo songs on a regular basis, but it’s pretty difficult for me to finish them.

Well, the announcement to say that I was no longer a member of Vampire Weekend was something that was in the works for a long time. I knew that it was the right choice for me.

I’m very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the ’60s sounded like.