Ryan Lewis

“I think most producers and MCs are constantly in this competition, but it's usually with yourself. It's usually wanting to be innovative: wanting to catch yourself when you're doing the same thing or throwing out the same art you've already done.”

“I love history, cultural and religious studies, philosophy, photography and traveling.”

“Some songs go super-quick; some take a really long time.”

“When you are 10, and you are with friends making music or playing sports or doing whatever, I would say, enjoy that and try to keep that as the model for as long as you can.”

“In 1984, my mom gave birth to my older sister, Teresa. Due to a complicated delivery, she needed a blood transfusion, and at that moment, my mom had HIV+ blood put into her body.”

“I have never been wired to be front and centre of spotlight and ready to dance.”

“I graduated in 2009, which - if you think back to where the economy was at that time - was an interesting time to graduate.”

“I'm the only person in my entire extended family that plays an instrument or sings, really. Which is kind of weird. I don't know where I got it from.”

“The music industry is transforming fairly rapidly.”

“You have no idea what you're passionate about until you give it a shot. If I hadn't been given a guitar or a camera or whatever, I'd be doing something different.”

“I bring up 'The Heist,' and you can almost cut that record down the middle between songs where the beat came first and the words came second, and songs where the words came first and the beat came second. It can start with a vibe, a beat that drives a story, or it can start with a story and then trying to identify the tone to tell that story right.”

“Rick Rubin is super intriguing to me because he has become this god producer in completely drastically different genres, which very few people have done.”

“Any time we have the opportunity to play in a more intimate room, there's such a huge aspect of our set just built for that. And beyond that, we just love being that close to our fans.”

“Seattle isn't known for a particular production sound, so that leaves a lot of great producers in Seattle doing kind of their own thing. And I think, for me, I was probably enough removed from hip-hop that my style was even a little bit weirder than that.”

“There's an open door now more than ever to be making any type of beats that you want.”

“The process is so much longer than the result for almost everything all of us are doing.”

“There is something about me that is collaborative, that wants to get the best performance out of somebody else or to hear something that somebody else has done that's good and to try and make it great.”

“When artists who are not associated with the typical infrastructure get recognition, that becomes a cultural movement.”

“How do I use my platform? How do you join in a way that is useful and not distracting and not shining a light on you?”

“I have an AIDS ribbon tattooed on my arm.”