Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Bradford Cox

I'm a really friendly guy, I guess, and I really like meeting people.

Contrary to popular belief, maybe, I'm a really friendly guy, I guess, and I really like meeting people. And I'm not really super impressed even if you're my hero; I can just rap with you and we can hang. I'm not gonna like sit there and bite my lip and ask questions about certain songs - okay I might do that once or twice. But it's just, like, two people hanging out.

I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.

I feel very strongly about the subject matter in The Dallas Buyer's Club - about AIDS and people fighting illnesses, and fighting for survival against bad conditions.

I always write the first and last song of an album first, and then the middle just kind of happens.

When I do a record, it sounds more punk and raw. Or it will sound louder, or it will sound more shocking. Or mind-boggling. I'll be trying to figure it out, but once I've got it figured out I'll be like, I know this; I know where this came from. I think art is most interesting when the intention is not clear.

For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

I'm obsessed with five different things a day. It's like lightbulbs in a Christmas light chain.

I collaborate a little bit with different aspects of my own mind. I kick my own ass instead of kicking other people's asses.

All music is devotional, whether it's devotion to products, face washes, creams, plastic. Everybody is devoted to something.

I like my solitude, and I'm a strong-willed person; I'm a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.

I think the younger kids need to realize there's this whole forgotten 90s that people don't really talk about.

A song like "Walkabout", it's totally imitative. The goal of that song was to make people happy, and I've never really made a song to make people happy before. I really genuinely wanted people to listen to that song and have their spirits lifted.

Unlike the rest of everyone I hang around with, I don't drink, so I remember what happened after shows. And I have never hit on anyone after a show, I'm not that kind of person. Even if I was attracted to someone, I'd be too shy.

What could be more experimental than me writing a straight up love song?

I need punk rock. It's the medicine for me, but it's bitter and sickening. If you don't need it - if you're happy and healthy - run toward that.

I'll be honest with you, one of the things that frustrated me the most out the record leak thing, it had nothing to do with record sales - I mean, that's a joke. Has anybody looked at how many records anybody sells anymore? If you're not Jay-Z, a record leaking isn't going to affect you. It was just really personal.

I'm not the guy in the dress with the blood and the unrequited gay whatever - which, according to my psychiatrist, my gayness is a form of narcissism but you'll have to ask him about that.

I have really low self-esteem, and it's not easy for me to put myself on an album cover.

I've been used for writing rhythm guitar chords for a long time because it's so easy to play and chords just sound good on it.

You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste.

People roll their eyes and say, "Oh god, he's not rich or famous." I say it's relative. I mean, look at me: I'm 115 pounds and I grew up without money. To me, I'm rich because I don't have to worry about paying rent. I don't think about money now.

I'm more into Neil Young and radical honesty.

I don't think you should make music to make music, just to show that you can. That's the opposite of vitality.

When I go on a nostalgia trip it's not aesthetic. For me it's about trying to recapture the smell or the feeling of something that I've experienced in the past personally.

I don't like the sound of my own voice. And, for people I don't know, their impression of me is what they read on the internet, and they're so far off a lot of the time. I think people are intimidated by me, and I don't know why. Sometimes even my own bandmates can be intimidated, or irritated, by me. I come across as arrogant somehow. In reality, I've probably got the lowest self-esteem of anybody I know, which has really been rubbed in my face lately in personal situations.

Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music.

Sometimes, I do have something to say, so I'll sit there and I'll write a song to someone - and then I just throw it away because it makes me cringe.

I've been going through some personal things that have stirred up a lot of old wounds.

You think about people like Elvis, Kurt Cobain, or the Beatles, who grew up without privilege and needed a certain validation through peoples' acceptance, or admiration from their peers. And money is part of that, but it always comes too late.

I refuse to put myself into a situation in which I have to face some kind of "I'm losing it" kind of thing. I'm not "losing it"; it's changed. What it is is changing.

I want to satisfy the listener, exactly. I want to entertain the audience. I want the people to leave the show with the feeling I used to leave shows with when I was young, and I couldn't get over it for another three or four days after it. I just kept reliving the set in my mind.

I was trying to write a song based on a story in a random book of Puerto Rican short stories that I found in a thrift store. I thought it was really dark, and so I tried to interpret it. I've always been interested in writing from other people's perspectives and other gender perspectives.

I don't think it will ever be lessened. Because I always move on to something else - and the music that I listen to, that I ingest, is a lot different than what I put out. I'm always becoming obsessed with the next phase of my musical vocabulary.

I want the music to be heard as close to when I made it, as much as possible. I don't want to get into some "future of the music industry" thing, or where I stand on digital this or that, but I think it's ridiculous that a lot of people in the industry plan so far ahead that it makes a lot of improvisation impossible and makes a lot of people's expectations fixed and not fluid.

I've been going through a lot of... stuff. I need some space, which people were very kind enough to give me, and I feel really gracious about that. Nobody forces me to do things or say things or do interviews.

I want to build an audience that's willing to follow us in whichever direction we might choose.

When you listen to the Anthology of American Folk Music, or anything like that - a compilation of garage bands from the Northeast in the early '60s - you're not necessarily listening to the band and thinking about the lead singer, or the story of the group, or the context or the mythology of the group. You're just listening to the song and whether or not it has a hook.

We didn't have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you're young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.

A lot of Appalachian music has a certain haunted, foggy feel to it; a certain sinister quality. And that transcends who is singing it. I think it's good if an artist can represent some kind of culture that they either aspire to ignite, or that they themselves experience.

I am asexual. A-sexual. I read somewhere, maybe on Facebook, where somebody said something like, "I heard Bradford was gay, but then I heard he was bi." Then somebody wrote, "No, I heard he was asexual." And then somebody said, "That's bullshit - he totally hit on my friend after a show."

When money and fame happen too late, it's like pouring kerosene over a fire of self-loathing.

When young groups put out albums, they're always forced to go through this cycle of touring and talking and flaunting and posturing and peacocking. Nobody makes me do that anymore.

I think teenagers just don't have the persistence to pretend to like something they don't anymore. I used to do that - make myself like stuff that didn't immediately appeal to me. When you're 17 and checking out John Cage records from the library. It's not like it's got the hooks of a Ramones record, or a Beach Boys record. But at the same time, you're like, I know there's something in here that I'm supposed to understand. And then eventually you find it.

I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn't really want attention.

As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity.

I'm interested in acting as much as I'm interested in gardening. I want to garden, eventually. I want to learn how to do a lot of things. I've always wanted to learn how to paint, too. I'd like to try everything, but music is my reason for living.

You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

The first thing I think I ever played in public, aside from singing in church, would have been - and this is a true story - when I was about nine or 10 years old, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. I played the theme from Twin Peaks on a little tiny Casio keyboard. People politely applauded. I just fell in love with that song and thought it was very heartbreaking.

I don't have the capacity to write stuff consciously. When I do, it's really awful.

Usually I'm not really conscious of what's going on. I don't have a lot of memories onstage. At all.

I'm real critical of myself. I think a lot of what I've done is boring indie rock. I didn't intend it to be that way, but somehow milk gets added to everything.

You gotta have friends, and it's really hard to have friends that don't operate on the same schedule as you or do the same kind of things you do, because they don't understand it. And then you realize that your friends - your real-life friends - it's not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you're doing than how you're doing.

Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music. And it's not a namedropping thing, but there's just not that many people in this certain small little genre world we live in that I don't know or am not acquainted with. And I like them all; I get along with pretty much everyone. It wouldn't be unusual to see a thousand collaborations at some point.

I realized I had written maybe, I dunno, the first ever asexual love song. Where it's really just about a fear of dying alone - you need contact, you need love, you need empathy. You need this relationship but if there's no sex involved, people act like it's not a legitimate relationship.

I'm tired of watching attractive people trying to be ugly, struggling for authenticity. Why not be yourself?

I don't know if I have any real aspirations to be an actor. It was just something I was asked to do in sort of a friend way. And I thought, Why not?

I don't leave my room, and all I am surrounded by are guitars and equipment, y'know? It's not always the best place to be.

I used to be a lot more engaged on an improvisational level than other people. I was always on tour and always had a guitar in my hands, and when I went back home, my battery was at full charge. I had a lot of energy to get off, just impulses that I could draw upon.

I like playing at public schools. I like when there's more of a diverse audience. I'll play wherever people want to hear my music, and I'll be glad and grateful for the opportunity, but I'd rather not play for a bunch of white privileged kids. I'm not meaning that in a disrespectful way; you go where people want to hear your music. So if that's where people want to hear me play, I'm glad to play for them. But I'd rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.