Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Bryce Dessner - Page 2

David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.

When I'm writing instrumental music, I try to find musical and non-musical inspirations.

As a band gets more successful, there's a danger of falling in love with your own shadow.

David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.

Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.

I think that becoming a successful rock band is a little like becoming a professional athlete. Nobody plans on it.

A good song is a nice set of chords and some good lyrics; a great song is a song that reinvents itself over time. That you can always find something interesting in the more you listen to it - it keeps revealing something to you.

It’s important to me that people hear my music on its own merit and not in relation to another project I’ve done. Ultimately, the music has its own energy and message and stands on its own.

Obviously there are pieces of classical music that are some of the most beautiful music ever written, for me anyway is a lot of classical or contemporary music, so it's a different kind of space that you enter when you're listening to it.

A great painting is something that you can come back to again and again.

American politics are important because it affects the entire world in often negative ways.

In a way it's the emotional feeling that you get in a good rock song or folk song, there's just nothing that rivals that.

Most of my favourite guitarists are self-taught, because in a way there's less of a reverence for the instrument itself, so you end up finding and inventing however you want to play it.

For years The National has been labeled as a gloomy kind of rock bandI think mostly because of Matt’s deep baritone voice, which even if he is singing about unicorns and butterflies, he just sounds sad most of the time.

There are famous examples of people who just had really strange ways - [Jimi] Hendrix being the biggest example of that. Or someone like Keith Richards, he just has a really idiosyncratic style.