Lukas Forchhammer

“I wish we could not ever get recognised on the streets, do no selfies, and still perform music all over the world. Unfortunately I don't think that's going to be the case, but I'm doing my best to just keep my feet on the ground and my eyes on the prize.”

“It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.”

“Christiania has a lot of strong, nuclear families. It gave us a sense of empowerment and belonging and richness. We had so much love; we were never in doubt that we were wanted in this world.”

“I bought a restaurant - that was pretty expensive.”

“I write instead of going to the shrink!”

“Listening to all these different musical genres from all over the world and listening to my father's record collection, the Irish folk influences from home. Of course they're all in there somewhere hiding within the lyrics and melodies. But rap music was the biggest influence on my way of writing and my performing.”

“I get emotionally spent answering questions about my dead father and my criminal friends and my upbringing in a hippie environment in a marginalized community.”

“I don't like the whole 'slander, slander' conversation that most political debates are these days. So I tend to keep my political standpoint not to myself, but just relatively private.”

“It's always more fun when something happens outside of a script.”

“When you get frisked by the police at the age of 10, and they empty your schoolbag out in the street and kick your books around and calling you names because of where you live, you just get an anger towards everyone who is outside of your neighborhood.”

“'7 Years' seems to have attracted a lot of age groups - people seem to see their own lives in the song, and it's great to see so many people reacting in that way to it.”

“Our art, in a sense, is quite revolutionary.”

“I never watched any award show.”

“What hit me in the gut about hip-hop was that someone else grew up tough enough to be angry at the entire system.”

“Seeing my child born is so much more important than anything else I've got going on.”

“Writing is very cathartic for me.”

“The songs were there before the band was there, and it's my songs. And it's like, we're not in the 1950s. We can't call ourselves, like, 'The Revolvers' - it just doesn't work that way. And 'The Lukas Graham Band' just sounded wrong.”

“'7 Years' is, you could say, a song that eats its own children. That we need to get past the song and get to the person and get to the record and get to the music so we can keep releasing.”

“I really like singing. I believe that if I wasn't a good singer, I would have been tossed out of school.”

“A part of me understands why a mother is equally proud of all her children, but that little boy inside me just wants my mom to say, out loud but even just to me, 'I'm a little bit prouder of you.'”