Albert Hammond

“If I worked as a waiter, I'd go home and write songs and record them. I'd have to. It's the only thing I know how to do. It's the only thing I can do.”

“I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.”

“I feel like my strength is surrounding myself with people who have an ear for things, and then they play it for me. I'm always looking; my ear is always open.”

“I don't think I found out what I liked to wear until I was, like, 18.”

“My idea was you can't dress for the stage, you have to dress all the time like you're onstage. And so I would just always wear suits or some form of it. I wanted people to know I played music. That was kind of how you would find other people: you would just walk around looking a certain way and end up meeting someone who liked the way you look.”

“When starting a project, your influences are the things around you. It doesn't mean you have to sound like it or look like it or anything. It's just something new, and your curiosity becomes enthralled by it.”

“I actually use women's perfume - I have since I was a kid. It's called Anais Anais, from Rachael. It smells like a beautiful woman and a bouquet of flowers. I use that and Right Guard deodorant.”

“You know when you become friends with someone, you don't even remember? When you weren't friends? You're just kinda like, 'When were we not friends? When I met you, weren't we just already friends?' I have the same thing with the Strokes guys.”

“When you write songs, you're writing little bits here, little bits there.”

“I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.”

“Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.”

“When someone's really good at encapsulating human emotion and putting it out in a form that can reach a variety of people, that's going to have a big effect when he's no longer there.”

“I feel like I can be a frontman; I feel like I have good songs.”

“If I have an audience, I'd like to make music for my whole life. But it's not really up to me.”

“When I'm not on the road, I try to intake about 300 grams of protein a day, which is a lot. I got really into how your body absorbs it and how you feel and how crazy it is when you intake that much food and actually feel better, your brain works better, and you actually lose weight even though you're eating more. It's so methodical.”

“Change isn't a scary thing. It's constant and inevitable.”

“I just looked like there was only one thing I could do: be in a band. It looked like I was already successful, basically. Which is what I wanted to do when I was 16. I just felt like if you did that, aesthetically you would just draw people who were doing the same thing.”

“When people ask me for playlists, I always put in 'Moonlight Sonata' because it is my favorite song. I play it all the time.”

“When you put on music, just feel it; it's a different sense. I walk around with music in, and it can just change my world in seconds.”

“Egon Schiele is my favorite painter. There's just something about art - photography, painting, music, plays - whatever you see, sometimes there's a gut reaction that's more important or more visceral than what your brain is thinking about. You can't explain that reaction. It's like what happens when you fall in love.”