Beck Quotes

I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense.

There are people who've prepared their whole lives for real heavy success and bask in it. They're so good at it and they obviously love it. I'm just happy to be making a record.

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give.

Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know.

I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most.

There's an infinite amount of possibilities and detours and things that can distract you from actually just performing the song and having whatever emotion that's invested into the song come through in the recording.

As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.

Sometimes, I think the way the music business has been destructive and the way the fans are been put through it and try to navigate through it, so much is so foreign to what musicians would actually want to do or what would be natural to them.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

I've been practicing for years, trying to figure out how to record an entire band live.

I didn't want to do something typical.

Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig.

Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.

You spend so many months and years in the studio, and you see the clock ticking and so much time spent on the minutiae of technical things. And I just thought it'd be fun to do something extremely fast and get that rush of something that had some energy, something that you weren't tired of when you finished it.

Some need diamonds some need love
Some need cards some need luck
Some need dollar bills lining their clothes
all I need is, all I need is two white horses in a line

There are certain songs that just stick around and do something that transcends whatever time they were written in. Through different eras, people are able to impart different meaning to the song, and they become part of some sort of consciousness.

I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.

I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.

I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible.

You can't please everybody, man,

I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded.

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

love is a poverty you couldn't sell

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music.

When I did "Top of the Pops" for the first time, Ace of Base was one of the other bands, and I have a memory of them on a small stage next to me in the TV studio. A memory of their performance is burned into my mind. Seared.

I don't remember half of the new bands, though - and I think that's kind of where we're going. It's turning into just a big derby of songs. May the best song win.

Somebody else is satisfied by five Bentleys. I'm satisfied by a beautiful string arrangement.

Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.

There are certain records that you love because the songs are great, but you don't go to them as an example of great production.

When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the '50s/'60s generation was so dominant.

The limitations are limitless.

For the records I've work on over the last 10 years, I get sent the really compressed version and the non-compressed version, and oftentimes you end up going with the more compressed one because it's what people's ears are attuned to. I think the bigger problem is saturation and people being desensitized.

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

You can't write if you can't relate.

I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.

The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.

Originally, the lyrics to "Girl" were really upbeat, and then it didn't work for me somehow. You need the dichotomy. If you're doing something happy and light, you need the shadows.

There's a perception that if an artist produces another artist, they're going to imprint on them. But I'm the opposite.

In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs.

Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

I have for four years now been ringing the bell. Economic Holocaust is coming. Economic day of reckoning is coming.

Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?

When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.

When I pull out vinyl - which isn't that often anymore - it's undeniable that I get a different feeling. There's a different physiology happening between the sound waves and the body that doesn't happen with music playing off the computer.

There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing.

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.

Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz.

I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music.

If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated.

Back then, Pro Tools only had four or eight tracks, so we couldn't actually hear all the tracks. We could only hear eight at a time, so if a song had 25 or 30 tracks, we wouldn't be able to hear it until we went into the studio an put it all on tape. The process was a little bit backwards.

If we look at the fact that record covers are essentially advertisements for the music, we acknowledge a function and purpose to draw in the prospective buyer.

My whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche ... it's one of the reasons a lot of my generation are always on the fence about things. They're afraid to commit to anything for fear of seeming like a cliche. They're afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliche.

I know my own limitations. And if somebody says, "I need songs for a cartoon garage band - they look like this and they should sound like this," it gives you a direction. I like having that kind of assignment.

Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

Whether you're aware of it or not, any kind of collage idea becomes a part of how you see the world once you incorporate media and internet and video games and all these things.

I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it's usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank.

Let the desert wind cool your aching head. Let the weight of the world - drift away instead

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it.

When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.

You just want to go back to those 70s albums. Even a lot of the 90s indie records were still done on tape, and you hear the difference.

With my own music, I try to get away from things that are familiar and things that would be easy for me to go to.

I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.

The only way I was allowed to play was by convincing bands to let me do a few songs while they set up. That went on for years.

Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air.

Lonesome tears
I can't cry them anymore
I can't think of what they're for
Oh they ruin me every time

But I'll try to leave behind some days
These tears just can't erase
I don't need them anymore

How could this love
Ever turning
Never turn its eye on me
How could this love
Ever changing
Never change the way I feel

Lazy sun your eyes catch the light
With the promises that might
Come true for awhile

Oh I'll ride farther than I should
Harder than I could
Just to meet you there

How could this love
Ever turning
Never turn its eye on me
How could this love
Ever changing
Never change the way I feel

We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.

You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you'll start walking pretty weird.

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments.

When you say 'state' you mean 'national.' National Socialism. That is what Mussolini and Hitler did. National Socialism. State Capitalism. They've changed the name.

I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys.

You must see yourself as guardian, somebody who will preserve what is true and pass it on. Be a guardian. We don't need militants or revolutionaries. We need guardians. We need leaders.

Set your guitars and banjos on fire and before you write a song smoke a pack of whiskey and it'll all take care of itself.

It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

There's a destination,a little up the road. From the habitations and the towns we know. A place we saw the lights turn low. The jig-saw jazz and the get-fresh flow

When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.

When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic.

I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial.

Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.

I'm sure the music is going to come out. I'm not sure if I'm going to put out 12s or put the songs on my website. I just have to get them done.

I didn't go to high school. I never felt connected to people my age.

To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.

Sometimes, reissues can be revelatory, or put the original record in a different light, but those are rare.

In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I'm not technically a rapper, whatever that means.

I've said for years to wives and mothers, you must start to see yourself as Sarah Connor. You must equip your children with the information they need to survive an ever-changing world.

I would love to do an electronic record. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by.

[Early on,] the attitude was that what I was doing wasn't music.

I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by.