Adam Granduciel

“You can't really take it for granted that people listen to your music. I want to write songs that are on par, at least in my mind, with the ones I've loved for my whole life and that will be around forever.”

“I've just grown up. Respecting yourself and your art means taking an interest in the other responsibilities.”

“I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.”

“I was the guy who didn't get a cool little apartment. I took one for the team. I liked having the place we could make noise in, the place that could be the center of the music. I sat down and calculated it one day, and over the years, I've had something like 38 roommates.”

“All those crazy Impressionist painters in France were friends but they would write about how jealous and competitive they were. That's what makes good art.”

“When I was a kid, the Patriots were my team, but I didn't really care, you know what I mean? I got taken to a game once by a friend and it was the coldest I've ever been in my life. It was torture.”

“All of my favorite music was probably in the rock category.”

“In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.”

“I didn't want to start aiming for fame. It would be silly to not have entertained offers.”

“If I improvise vocals at an early stage of the song, I just kind of listen to the roll, and then I kind of have a little vocal hook.”

“I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon.”

“I was a bouncer, if you can believe it for a while in a sports bar. I let everybody in.”

“I've never set out to do anything other than get better at guitar and record and have fun. I feel like the Jazzmaster's just your comrade on that journey. It can be really subtle, it can be angry, it can be chill. It can be anything.”

“I think from an East Coast point of view, you'd be like, 'Oh, a California record's a sunny record.' It's like you spend three hours in the studio because the rest of the time you must be at the beach.”

“I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.”

“I don't know what the sound is or the song is until I've spent a lot of time on it. I'm always chipping away at it, rethinking it.”

“There's a lot of older musicians who say your whole life making music, you're really trying to get back to that first couple of things you liked when you were a kid. And as much as you might like to think you're not, you really are.”

“My mom and dad never really had friends, never went on vacations. We stayed home. And I see a similarity there: A general anxiety runs pretty deep.”

“The ability to work every day was a big part of L.A.'s effect on my process and the band coming out from Philly once a month.”

“With 'Slave Ambient', I was writing things on top of loops. Now I really get the structure of the song down, but I leave room for improvisation in the studio.”