Dev Hynes

“Yeah, I associate every sound with a color and vice versa.”

“I know a lot of people feel like they get eaten alive by New York, but I feel it more as a father figure or something - this huge presence watching over me. I definitely feel better and work freer here.”

“Radio voices have a solid, even texture.”

“Everything I do, I build a kind of confidence net - 'I'm able to execute this; it's fine.'”

“'Chamalkay' is an old Guyanese slang word. It means a 'young mischievous girl.' It's not derogatory, but it isn't over complimentary, either. It was probably a word I just Googled one day, and the song kind of played into the feel of that.”

“If I like something, I then have to study every single aspect of it to find out if there's more things that I would like, and it's just this weird hunger to want more. I always feel like there's so much that exists.”

“When I was recording music, I'd record all the parts myself, and I wouldn't let other people in; that's essentially what Blood Orange is the result of; me trying to find the most comfortable I can be with everything.”

“A lot of my friends were gay, so I was spat on on the bus daily, and I ended up in hospital a couple of times from being beaten up so badly.”

“I'm pretty much fully digital. I've basically spent a few painstaking days putting sounds into my laptop, just banking them, because I love playing, and I love visually seeing it on my screen and being able to change the sounds more, with different plug-ins. I've created my own synth sounds.”

“I'm pretty strict with videos, at least the imagery stuff.”

“Some people say I do it too much, but I'm always asking the artist questions. Sometimes - especially with new artists - you can see they're compromising in their mind. You see that look when they're listening to a vocal take and there's hesitation. And I'll be like, 'Are you sure you don't want to do this again?'”

“When I was asked to compose a score for... 'Palo Alto,' I first thought to myself, 'What is the house that these characters would want to live in?' I wanted to paint a picture and color scheme that I could work around. I gently apply different daubs to see what fits to match the color I have in mind with these characters.”

“I see no kind of reason to not just try everything. I mean, I feel like we all have such varied tastes, and to not just try our tastes is a crime.”

“The issue I had with the Lightspeed albums was that usually the main purpose with them was to fulfil really dorky musical goals, like, 'I wonder if I can do that,' and it was all very personal. It was more that once I'd finished the goal of what the song was, I was kind of done. It was like ticking boxes.”

“I don't really care about audio quality. If people saw some of the ways that I record stuff, they'd see I don't care in that respect. I obviously care about things sounding good, but I think quality exists through other things like emotionally connecting with a lyric or a feeling, or whatever.”

“Every day there's a lot of things I block out, because if I start visualising things, I tend to go completely insane. I've always had anxiety issues, and it can totally overwhelm me and suck me under if I'm not keeping focused. I just think and think until I have a panic attack, and then it dies down.”

“It's funny because I think, as a general rule, that people seem to think that if you do lots of different things over the course of, like, a timeline, it means that you kind of disregard what you did before. But that's not true of me. I still genuinely like everything I did as much as I liked it when I released it.”

“Cello is my first instrument, then piano, drums, bass, violin, recorder, saxophone, but I'd never play them live!”

“I was 13 years old at music school talking to my teacher. I can't quite remember what it was I was trying to describe, but I do remember my music teacher saying to me, 'Do you have synesthesia?' In hindsight, it seems a little presumptuous of her to think a little boy in Essex would know what synesthesia was.”

“I like to blur the line between remix and cover version and new song.”