A biography for Aaron Dessnerhasn’t been written yet.
“If I'm not working on music, I'm probably torturing my infant daughter, Ingrid, with kisses or running or playing soccer in the park.”
“I busked a few times in Asheville, North Carolina, when I was 18. It was terrifying. I was probably just trying to meet girls.”
“Big Red Machine is really a community effort: I guess it involves almost 30 musicians. It does come out of our friendship, but it's really something that is deeply collaborative.”
“The song 'Hymnostic' is kind of a gospel song, and that song is really fun to sing with as many people as possible. And anyone can sing it, you know?”
“Die Like a Rich Boy' has, for me, some of the strongest lyrical content I've heard in many years; an epic love song laced with dark imagery and acerbic social criticism.”
“After years of touring you experience music festivals that are mostly the same - where you copy and paste the same experience into a muddy field in California or a muddy field in England.”
“I tried hard not to think about the scope or scale of making a record that would be heard by millions and millions of people. I did a pretty good job of tuning that out.”
“And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.”
“I think the idea is that every time we perform Big Red Machine music it should be different somehow - like, different people, different songs maybe, definitely different versions of the songs.”
“Whenever I write anything, I do sing to it, to try and make sure it's interesting or compelling to sing to. I've gotten in the habit of sharing that with other, more charismatic vocalists.”
“Our recordings, you feel that it's been, not labored, but you feel that it's been constructed in a way where sometimes it's hard for us to create the feeling that this was done in a room.”
“David Longstreth is one of the great guitar heroes of our generation.”
“I grew up fly fishing when I was a kid. The feeling of it is fun. I went fly-fishing on Lake Delaware once, and I caught a record brook trout.”
“Just because you listen to The National, Spotify might tell you that you want to listen to The Lumineers' music. Well, maybe you don't.”
“There's no one songwriter in the band. It's collaborative, and we all have different tastes.”
“Anyone who's speaking up about anything becomes a target.”
“It's actually not that hard to play guitar in a rock band.”
“I'm probably more obsessed with football that I am with music.”
“My wife is from Copenhagen and her father has been a huge Liverpool supporter since the early 1960s.”
“I am an expert at applying premade pesto to pasta.”