Best 83 quotes of Stephen Malkmus on MyQuotes

Almost every band has somebody who's the main songwriter and who has a vision, a very clear idea of how a song should be.

[As a frontman ] I'm going to wear leather pants and get blowjobs in the studio. That would be nice. They are definitely not cool, but I like them. I don't listen to them, but I like them when I hear them on the radio, normally.

But, then again, I wouldn't call myself an indie-rock supporter even if there are some really good bands out there and there will always be some real good new bands.

But we're still rehearsing and planning to make a new album next year. We have some really good new songs that we've already been playing on that last tour that we just finished.

Despite my own doubts of being marketable or crushworthy, my goal was to write a record of peppy pop songs, hopefully without annoying anybody.

Everyone wants to be loved, generally. If you released a record and nobody said anything, if you didn't get any feedback from people you don't know, i.e. the press, you'd be sort of upset. To me, any press is good press.

Family is the best. I can honestly say, it's a gift that is beyond making art. I didn't know that when I got into it.

George Oppen wasn't a larger than life personality, but I'm not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too.

I did some writing. I was just taking the kids to school. I did a couple things and we did some tours. It was a lot of downtime.

I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.

I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.

If a voice is just too nice, without an edge, it kinda all flows by. You forget it. You don't listen to the lyrics.

I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.

If someone's really busy listening to other CDs, and worried about what's new and what's truly relevant for discourse now, maybe it isn't that interesting. To me it is, because I'm tuned into that and that's what I like, so it's interesting to me. It's all I can do.

If you'd rather learn how to ride a horse or something, I would say do that. That'll keep you out of trouble. You would think a band would get you in trouble, but I think it's the opposite.

If you have no shame, and it’s your goal to get people into bed, how much higher could your success rate possibly be?

If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.

I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.

I hated it so much as a child. I just didn't like it when punk bands went metal, it really bothered me. It was happening left and right in the 1980s. It started I think with D.C. bands - G.I., Soul Side, they went metal. Right at that time, R.E.M. was coming out, these more kinda feminine bands, and I was more drawn to that than to go metal. And you remember MTV, with the bad metal. But even Metallica, it just wasn't my direction.

I just don't think people listen. I mean, they can't listen to a whole album closely without checking their iPhone or wanting to skip to their favorite song, or putting something else on, practically. That's why the zone out is a good thing.

I know the world doesn't need maybe another of [a particular type of song] - the same thing again - but you can't help yourself. And some people like it, but you kind of know in your heart that it's a lesser version of what you've done before. But maybe it has a good tempo, or it feels fresh, but it's still not.

I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.

I like that band Get Hustle. They're cool live. I haven't heard their records, though.

I'm better when I'm an autodidact and things just come. Or you're just blessed. I'm not bragging or anything, it just comes to you.

I'm just kind of a hippie. Age is not that relevant to the music.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

I'm not dying for everyone to hear everything we do. Forty minutes every two years is sensible.

I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.

I'm sort of socially inept, so music is my way to connect to people. It's a means of socializing and having a life. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. I would just make home recordings and play them for myself. And that's not really healthy.

I'm thinking, I'm singing like Ozzy Osbourne, but I don't sound like him enough, ever.

In the early '90s, it felt like there was space - there was like an empty feel. There was nobody really doing this. Maybe the Pixies were, a little bit. Their lyrics were also disjointed, more psychosexual or something. That's part of youth, too, maybe, that you just feel like you're doing something different.

I still hate [the Eagles]…. There’s levels of evil in it to me.

I think the focus of the media changes. At the moment the more electronic stuff like trip-hop was the flavor of the month, just a little while ago. It all depends on the angle, from which point of view you see it.

It's hard to think back. I didn't even know I was going to do it, make actual records. But I was always making up songs, once I figured out that you could do it. I think it's pretty much the same, but there's less urge to get it moving out there. There was a time when it seemed like it was really super important to the audience and now it's just medium-important for people to like us. But that's okay.

It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.

It's normally in the morning, just playing around. And I'm not saying everything I make is great, but that's what I do. I can't even remember how I wrote stuff.

I've been getting plenty off my chest. Sometimes I get too much off my chest and I regret it.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don't come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can't do a riff album. I'm more of a song, melody person.

I was a kid, I loved music, that was our social thing. That's what we bonded on. That's what my Saturday nights were, looking to see what bands were playing. And some of those people were the coolest people ever. I want to participate in that. And I hope other people feel that and they're like, "Yeah man, this is part of it, this is why I love music.

I would just imagine there's a criticism for just about everything, if you want to take something down. No one's invincible. The Jicks are a work in progress and we don't think everything we do is the bee's knees or something, we're just trying our best to get turned on by what we're doing.

Like the song "Stereo", to me that's like, kind of hip-hop in that slacker way. There's some slackerisms mixed in with that stuff, but it wasn't really conscious, I guess. When things would get more typical rock'n'roll that was my fallback to go to those kind of lyrics instead of the alternatives.

Lou Reed is something like a personal favorite of mine, but you could always put me into that drawer of singers who can't really sing, who speak their songs.

Most people want to be seen or heard. You want to shine. That's my way of shining.

My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.

My wife says that I changed people's lives or ways of thinking and that I should always be proud and grateful. If I'm dismissive of what we do sometimes, a little bit, she's like, "I was a fan, you changed my life," or whatever. That's what she says.

One time I went to Berlin and, for some reason, everywhere I was going they had fishbowls. Like a fishbowl by your bed or a fish tank in the bar. They seem obsessed with this IKEA version of nature, which a fishbowl kind of is. They had that going on. I just don't really like having a goldfish by the side of my bed. I feel kind of sad for it, rather than happy. But I thought that was really weird. Maybe they have human fishbowls.

Some people, they've had a lot of fun, even if it was dumb fun and a shitty body of work.

Something taken off the page can sound great, I guess. Usually it doesn't. It seems like lately Pitchfork is trying to champion lyric writers more.

So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics.