Best 18 quotes of Rostam Batmanglij on MyQuotes

Rostam Batmanglij

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    As far as the lyrics go, I think I was negotiating a moment in my life where I didn't feel happy. I think I had some existential frustration and I was wrestling with that on a few different levels. I was feeling like I wanted to change a lot of things.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I did take guitar lessons as a teenager, though, and I started to teach myself how to play everything I could play on the guitar on piano, so I had a really weird, non-traditional route to proficiency. I think it probably helped me come at things from a new angle.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I feel connected to every song on this record [ 'Modern Vampires Of The City' ], but yeah I think there's something special about 'Young Lion'. It's pretty different from any song that we've had before because the vocals are kind of between two different very simple instrumental piano melodies and it's almost like something that we call a vignette, it's sort of like a miniature.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I guess I have some kind of a visceral connection with drums. I'm looking to create music that people can react to viscerally, and people will respond to viscerally. I think that you can listen to music, to a song you've never heard before and not really like it, but also feel like you're responding to it physically whether you like it or not. I think that's a powerful aspect about music, and I think that's something that draws me to drums.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I had no problem working for 15 hours straight when I was producing someone else, but I couldn't do it with my own songs. It took that moment of pointing the camera at myself to realize that it was okay to get lost in making my own music. I think before that I was scared of pushing myself to the point of staring into the abyss.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I like the idea that a song can be about a romantic relationship, but it can also about a relationship to your career, or a relationship to your city. It can be about a person, but at the same time it can be about a situation.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I like the idea that a song can be something that you can lean on, both for the songwriter and for the person who hears the song.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I think summer, at least as I've experienced it, can be joyous but it can also be tough emotionally. Physically, it can be hot to the point of being unbearable and I think you want to capture that frustration, but also the release.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I wanted to make an album where every song is kind of interacting - where you can't tell what's the string arrangement and what's the song. I guess that came out of going to college, majoring in music, studying classical music, and even as a kid, being really drawn to classical music.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    I would say I was a little bit outgoing, a little bit shy. I was definitely much more shy than my brother. I was young - age six. I was really drawn to music because my brother started playing instruments and I wanted to be at his level, even though I was younger.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    Now that that album's done [TModern Vampires of the City], I have time to revisit things that I was working on earlier, previous to it. I actually found it very helpful to be working on some music on my own.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    Obviously it always takes longer to finish an album than you think it will. That's always going to be the case. Everything takes longer than you think it will. Occasionally things happen fast.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    One of the things that we talked about was this idea of 'Memento Mori' - like the reminder of our own mortality - and so we were sort of trying to express that in our press photos. And it's one of the themes of the album [Modern Vampires of the City] as well.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats. I was starting to learn the signifiers of production from the '60s, the '80s. We never re-recorded anything. All the record companies that wanted to sign us - except for one - were excited about the recordings that we had done ourselves.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    'Unbelievers' was a song that we felt like we could tackle, so that's one of the reasons we wanted to start playing it live, we really believed in that song and we still believe in that song a lot.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    We thought there was also something that was humorous but at the same time powerful and deep about naming the album, 'Modern Vampires Of The City'.

  • By Anonym
    Rostam Batmanglij

    We've always said that our band is pretty much an open system and there's no rules governing anything... so who knows what the future will hold?