Dean Wareham Quotes

The road, lyric-wise, is a trap, and a bore. Maybe it's interesting to me, but I don't think it's a connecting thing with other humans. What is there to write about? Truck stops, hotels, clubs?

There's all kinds of ways to be misunderstood, and one of them is via the interview.

Writing songs does not get any easier, and that might be because I am harder on myself than I was twenty years ago. Hopefully, as we grow older and change, there are fresh topics, new perspectives, or at least there should be.

It's weird being an author because it's different than writing songs. You put so much more of yourself out there to be judged because it's a memoir. So when the reviews come in, they all feel really personal. Some people are just going to hate you no matter what. Personally, I never believe good reviews.

I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.

If I look at my own recordings, I think generally there is a focal point within the song and often it's the instrumental bridge or a guitar solo where we try to do something unexpected, something beautiful or weird, or beautiful because it is weird. And of course I fail half the time, but yes that is the goal, to create even a few seconds of bliss, or sadness. The electric guitar is a great instrument for doing this because it is capable of surprising you. There are so many different sounds available.

It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band.

The thing about interviews is that if someone interviews you, and they're an idiot, then they make you sound like an idiot, too. They ask you stupid questions, and they bring you down to their level. It's tempting to not ever want to talk to anybody, but you can't do that.

Once you hit 40, being in a band - a committee voting constantly on what you're going to be doing next month - it's more of a challenge. And when you have a kid as well.

I've never played in Vegas. I've only been to the airport, but even the airport was exciting. Just flying in, looking out the window, you feel the pull of it, like it's some evil force pulling you in, like Mordor.

I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.

I'm tired of being in a band, but I do want to continue making records and performing, at least a little bit. Making the records isn't always fun. It's fun to be finished with them. Making beautiful things can be quite painful.

I know I get a real kick, an emotional charge, out of playing a song I haven't played for 10 years. It just takes you back to that point in your life.

I have a slightly bourgeois upbringing, I guess. My parents paid for me to go to school, which is nice, but I haven't gotten a dime since then. I have no trust fund. I wish I did.

Things can turn ugly so quickly in the music business, especially if you have an unexpected success.

You have to love yourself or you'll never be able to accept compliments from anyone.

It's easy enough to foist your music collection on your kids. Lectures are not required; you just play the stuff while they are prisoner in the back seat on a long drive, or softly in the background while eating dinner.

I think a lot of bands go on way past the point where they're relevant. Some of them keep doing it because they're making millions of dollars. Or people are afraid - they don't know what else to do. It's scary to get out of a relationship of any kind.

Great guitar players are a dime a dozen. It is sometimes your very limitations as players that set you apart from the crowd.

My standards are higher than they used to be, I think. They don't necessarily have to make sense, but I certainly work on them a lot harder now
partly because I do them on the computer, and I print them out and fix them, and print them and fix them over and over again, whereas in the early days I used to just scratch down a few things on a piece of paper.

People forget that keeping a band together is hard; man, it's really hard. All the cliches apply about living in each other's pockets; of it being a relationship, a marriage, a family.

One of the nice things about being in a band is that you depend on each other for ideas, so it's not all up to me to do everything myself. There's always that fear that you'll run out of stuff. The most difficult part for me is writing lyrics, and that starts to get difficult after you've written, like, 120 songs.

It's a scary question for a musician or songwriter today - what does the future hold? It is a strange time in the music business too; it feels like we are all in some kind of transitional period, stuck between old technology and new.

They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.

Galaxie 500 broke up because it was time. We broke up as a result of internal contradictions.