Beck

“Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.”

“Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.”

“Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.”

“The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.”

“There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.”

“I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.”

“If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about?”

“In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.”

“I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.”

“Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side.”

“You're just the girl of my dreamsBut it seems my dreams never come true”

“Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air.”

“I didn't want to do something typical.”

“I sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.”

“I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense.”

“I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.”

“I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.”

“Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.”

“There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.”

“If we look at the fact that record covers are essentially advertisements for the music, we acknowledge a function and purpose to draw in the prospective buyer.”