Top 60 Alison Sudol Quotes

Percussion is so good for me!

If you’re going to learn how to ride a bike as an adult, do it somewhere where there’s no people in the middle of the countryside. Don’t do it where people are born on bikes basically.

I’m a big cinephile. Love, love, love films.

My parents were acting teachers, but I was a bookworm who was passionate about music.

To me, the making of art and experiences around that are the biggest part to me.

I was in a commercial when I was three. My godfather was a director and a producer of commercials. He took me in along with his kids and I couldn’t remember my lines. I giggled my way through the commercial and they kept it.

I grew up listening to a lot of classic jazz, and stuff like The Beatles, and old Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. I just loved all of that.

I want you to feel in ‘Riversong’ like you’re floating down a river on your back, and you’re looking at the stars, and everything is incredibly still and peaceful.

With music, every decision you make is a reflection on who you are – I’ll obsess over the color palette for a record and the promo materials. With acting, it’s not just your ideas. You’re one part of a working machine.

Whenever you meet another woman, you immediately revert to you five-year-old self thinking, ‘do you want to be my friend. Can I keep you?’

I love doing free shows because then anyone can come.

There’s a certain amount of pressure that you get from being a popular artist, and I think in the past I put a lot of pressure on myself, too. But I always knew that writing hits wasn’t really my strong suit.

I think you can do a lot with lyrics and melody.

Stories have always been incredibly comforting and can help illuminate things that are hard to understand other wise.

Sometimes we get so focused on the results that we miss doing it – we miss the adventure of being in the midst of something because we’re looking too far ahead.

I did a couple auditions, failed miserably, was about to give up, and booked ‘Transparent.’

Even when my every inclination is to be otherwise, I don’t want to live my life on the dark side of things. Sometimes that takes a little bit of effort, and when that’s the case music is the way that I totally make sense of things.

I think something that is never really spoken about is the learning process of making records – I made my first record at twenty one and learned so much about record making from that before making ‘Bomb In A Birdcage’ a couple of years later.

I always wanted to be an artist of some sort and I was really shy growing up, so performing didn’t really seem like a natural choice, but whenever I got on stage to do something I felt more comfortable than I did in real life.

I don’t love my speaking voice, frequently – but I think that we need music, and when a person sings, those kind of vibrations go through your body, it’s amplified in the room. It goes through everyone else’s body, too.

I always try to scour local vintage shops and antique stores as much as I can while I’m on the road – it’s my version of hunting for buried treasure.

I do love to dance, and that’s fun, but I will never stop writing my quiet, sensitive songs.

I found movies to be such a beautiful escape.

I was a teenager with a lot of strangeness in me that I didn’t know how to express. I was trying hard on the outside to be very normal and fit in, but inside I was a big weirdo. Thank God that little weirdo persisted, otherwise I would be so sad.

In my mind, I’m still that kid who gets affected by other people’s music.

I can Hula-Hoop and read a book at the same time.

A boy I adored when I was 19 gave me the ‘Emigrante’ album by Orishas. Definitely not my normal taste, but I still kind of love it.

Women are often written as one thing – the ingenue or the vamp – but real women are many things.

It’s hard to constantly delve into your psyche and unearth these deep and often painful feelings and hold them out in front of people and say, ‘Here’s the most vulnerable part of me.’

I have an affinity for a lot of things that are kind of fairy-tale-ish and bookish.

Both with songwriting and playing a role, you’re delivering the truth of something in a moment. In a lot of ways, it’s the same thing.

I want to have a long career, so I’m fine with it growing slowly.

Because I grew up around the reality and heartbreak of acting, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

There are so many things I’ve done that I’m glad I’ve done privately because it’s so embarrassing just anyway.

I’ve had a lot of experience with not allowing myself to experience certain emotions, like anger and confidence, and with acting you’re in this space where it’s safe to fully go there.

I won’t do the same thing over and over again.

Whether it’s a photograph or a piece of clothing, a leather bag or a film, I tend to gravitate towards simple, beautifully made, quietly lovely things. They make me happy.

I’m learning to communicate honestly and knock it off with the hiding.

I was a very quiet kid who didn’t feel normal being outgoing and running around, so all the beauty that was in my life, I found in books. Books that made me think and transported me into a different world.

Pines’ is a different kind of album for me. It was a different approach, everything about it, I just went at it as if I had never made a record before basically.

I want to find more ways of planting trees and helping fight against deforestation.

I really listened to a lot of oldies. I didn’t really listen to anything that was modern until I was 11 or 12.

There’s something about a long, high-waisted skirt and little, buttoned blouse that I really love.

If you’re gonna steal from somebody, why not Shakespeare?

I was so afraid of being lumped into this category of female actresses trying to sing.

Especially growing up in Los Angeles, there’s just a very different mind-set than my own. There’s no ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in Los Angeles. There’s ‘Laguna Beach.’

How many women have been in a mental institution because they’ve been called crazy when they’re just not allowed to be honest or be who they are?

I look to films to learn and to see different avenues that you can take in growing up.

The song ‘Almost Lover’ is very important to me, because when I wrote it, I threw everything away. That kind of set the bar as a writer, as a singer, as a person.

If I’m in a social situation where I’m triggered, I go into the bathroom and move and shake and breathe.

I mean, I knew that one day I’d do something writing-oriented as soon as I started writing. But when I started singing, I was determined to make those two work together, so I just worked at it until I started making stuff that sounded like music.

When I am going through something monumental or difficult in my life it is hard to look at it as it is because it is too much.

I love Bright Eyes – I absolutely love him.

There are two things I love about Temescal. One is the sense of space that you get when you get to the top. You can see for ages. You can see the ocean spread out before you, but you also feel like you’re in the mountains. And second is the smell of it, which I love most when I’ve been traveling a long time.

My architectural education is way, way incomplete, but if you’re in a beautifully designed space, it can change the way you see and the way you feel. The same way great movies and great music can immerse you, so can a space.

Singing has an impact on the human body.

I think I had a lot of fear, even when I was really young, that I was going to be seen as something that I didn’t want to be. I didn’t really know how to be myself well enough to be comfortable being someone else.

I’m just really not good at being like anybody else or writing like anybody else.

I can be very pessimistic and very dark, but there is also a part of me that’s very determinedly optimistic.

I feel like for me my happiest moments are tinged with the awareness that there’s sadness on the flipside of the coin.