American - Musician | May 3, 1981 -
You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.
Josh Tillman
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I was like, 'Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.'
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I was kind of bored playing drums in a band. Which was depressing, because playing in the band was kind of a golden ticket.
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Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.
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Laurel Canyon is kind of grotesque. It's this nature-themed place, and everybody is kind of angry.
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My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.
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I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.
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I had this revelation, you are a lot better at the between-song stuff than you are at the song stuff. That was devastating. And I usually find devastating things to be pretty valuable.
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When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn't want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off.
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There's a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.
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I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.
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If music was made by some kind of critical theorist, it would sound like my music.
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