Top 60 Lou Barlow Quotes

I don’t really have friends in general. I never have. I didn’t go to college and didn’t have friends in high school.

I can finish a show and walk through the audience without being recognized.

I don’t know what ontological means… I barely graduated high school, and I have never heard that word in conversation.

Most of the times that I’ve written break-up songs, it’s been different because I was always trying to get back to something: get back to a situation or talk my way or sing my way back into the relationship.

Sebadoh were always kind of the un-band. We never really lived in the same town.

I’m fully aware, I’ve gotten terrible reviews my entire career. It’s not a really big deal; it’s something I can deal with.

The Music Machine is my favorite rock band ever.

That’s what I’ve figured out over the years – the way I write makes people feel uncomfortable.

Coming back to Dinosaur Jr. and actually writing songs for the band was really intense for me.

I think all food except for maybe pizza and Mexican food is better in Japan.

Now, when I have a four-string that I take on the road with me, it’s a regular Martin. I bought a decent Martin with a pickup in it, and then I just take off the strings and have four strings on it.

At 12 or 13, I picked up a guitar because my mother made me learn how to play.

To be doing interviews in 2006 for a band I was kicked out of in 1989 – a band that I never thought I would play for again – in a way, it’s weird.

The first songs I ever wrote – my first, like, serious offerings – were all written on ukulele. It’s always been a part of the way I write for a really long time.

I think musicians naturally gravitate toward music that sounds real.

I just write… I follow the melodies that I can’t forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.

From when I young, a lot of the things I grappled with, with instruments, was how large they were. When someone places a large guitar in your lap, it’s hard – I’d learned how to play a guitar when I was a kid, but I never really felt like I was in control.

It’s weird to say, but Sebadoh is kind of Dinosaur Jr. Jr. My two bandmates in the early Sebadoh era, Jason Lowenstein and Jeff Gaffney, were huge Dinosaur fans. They were very influenced by Dinosaur.

I’ve managed to alienate most of what would be considered the core audience that I’m supposed to have had.

I keep the tantrums to a minimum because people don’t want to see that.

Don Henley is real fallback for awfulness.

I love making records, and part of really doing that and being happy about it is just that each time I’ve done something, I come to terms with what maybe is wrong with it, and then I move on to the next thing.

I wrote ‘Healthy Sick,’ from our first LP, when I was 19. I’ll happily play it till I’m 91 because it always feels good and truthful.

I always felt weird. I don’t feel particularly likeable.

I’ll figure something out by writing a song about it.

There are very few songs I really hate.

Los Angeles was really beautiful, and California in general is a great place to live.

Some people play steel string beautifully, but I’m not exactly a world-class picker.

One thing about when I came back into Dinosaur that was really cool was that pretty much anybody that J. was working with who had a long-term relationship with J. were people I really liked and that I actually may have already known.

I like to collaborate with other people for studio recordings because I believe collaboration, in any form, makes music better.

People in the Midwest, there’s a lot of regional pride and a lot more, like, fake positivity – ‘That’s great – you’re awesome!’

‘Brace the Wave’ is an acoustic-electric record recorded with electricity on analog-digital and digitally-analog equipment.

I’m a huge Zombies fan.

I have an aversion to taking care of my gear, a wayward manifestation of my punk ethos.

I’m realizing I need to be in close proximity to everyone I’m working with because that – I don’t know – it keeps me engaged.

It’s kind of crazy how music helped me overcome the anxieties that I have.

I went back and reread the Dinosaur chapter in ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life,’ and it was so depressing.

Worry is a big part of my life. I definitely worry a lot.

My voice is not very dynamic.

I’m the Folk Implosion’s biggest fan.

Just from the beginning, I really liked playing around with tape recorders. And then, when I got into punk rock, I only really liked – the rawer it was, the more I was into it.

At nine or ten, I was playing guitar in music class in my elementary school in Jackson, Michigan. They had a guitar class, and I played with ten of my classmates, and we did a little guitar orchestra for a school music.

I think people, just because of digital recording and how computers have become such an important part of our lives, I think the means to record music now is in more people’s hands. It’s a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Every show I play is like a little celebration of something in my life that has gone really well.

The minute we first started recording ‘Defend Yourself,’ I thought, ‘Yeah. We’re going to have to deal with a really terrible review from Pitchfork for this record.’

I have to focus and keep things together as much as anyone with a real job… It’s just that I know, from experience, that the more fun I have doing something that the more successful it will be.

Some of my songs are positive and stuff, but some are about staring down at the ground and obsessing about stupid things, and it is teenage in a way.

If you make a strange, eccentric record – like the Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’ – it takes on its own mood because it’s less about a shrewd marketing plan; it’s more about an individual emotion.

I was cripplingly shy. When I was in high school, my teachers thought I was mentally disabled because I wouldn’t be able to say anything or do anything. They thought I didn’t speak.

I remember being inspired by this band Godflesh, actually. They were a really heavy metal band, really nihilistic.

I’ve never been good at playing live in front of people.

I’ve learned by experience that, if I get too clever with lyrics, or if I’m not totally embodying my own wants and needs in the songs, I can’t remember them.

I hear people telling me a lot that the production of that particular record – ‘One Part Lullaby’ – really influenced them. I’m like, ‘What? We were dropped from the label after that!’

I look forward to so many things about going to Japan. The shows are early. It’s great! They’re really early, so it helps make dealing with jetlag a little easier.

Literally everything I do is either write songs and play music, or I’m immersed in my domestic life.

After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.

I really don’t have a method. I gravitate towards the organic/acoustic, but I still often complete songs musically before attempting to find the lyric.

All the issues you deal with get more complicated as you get older; it takes more focus to write songs that reflect what you’ve gone through.

I’ve put out a lot of stuff that just confused and alienated people: a huge chunk of songs that were verbal and musical challenges to myself, thoughts I was keeping myself busy with, nothing I had any intention of anybody grasping onto.

Harmony Korine, the screenwriter, was really into my early work. I did a lot of stuff under the name Sentridoh and a lot of 4-track cassette stuff that he was into.