A day off after a show with no agenda in a foreign city is about the most fertile creative situation I can imagine. Just walking with nothing to do, killing time and hearing the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar place.
What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.
Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.
Anyway, I'm digressing, but this is just kind of this 10-and-a-half-minute, ambient - you hear cicadas and birds and the wind outside and crickets as I'm swelling the piece. I could never do that on a pop record. I could, but why would I want to be agitating?
There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.
Just don't let the human factor fail to be a factor at all
Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones.
When I'm onstage, I'm completely comfortable, and I feel very vital and alive.
Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.
I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.
I write a lot more when I'm happy, because you're hopeful, you're motivated.
Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound. It's not trying to replace a band, per se. It's become a completely different thing. And it's not just simply an effect. It's just a very surprisingly intuitive thing.
Correlation across replicated environments adds a whole new dimension of complexity of the environment, ... You would expect most application groups to have the same set of policies. In reality, you have differences in policies. That reflects back to that whole process of manual storing in the environment.
I've done my share of busking, and it's fun until it isn't. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they're so good.
No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.
In New York, I'm playing in a church, solo, doing instrumental stuff. There's talk of doing more, like, installation-type things with some of the specimen horns I've played through. Just filling a room in a museum with these horn-speaker sculptures and then making loops that run all day, and you walk around the room and sort of mix the sound by where you stand. That's all way in the future, but that kind of stuff is a different way of thinking about performing.
The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.
The idea of writing songs because you're depressed and you need to communicate it somehow, that isn't really true for me.
The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter.
The melodies come out so strong that I'm like, "Oh, crap." It's really better if they could both be kind of able to compromise, but the melodies, even more recently, they come out very fully cast and formed.
Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. Theyre all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. Theyre tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.
I create little challenges for myself, like, 'Okay, whatever you do in this song, you've got to somehow work in Greek Cypriots,' or something like that.
I'm a terrible Scrabble player.
I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.
Some of my earlier songs are kind of more about mental illness.
