Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by DJ Shadow

Any good album title has multiple meanings, and I like choosing titles where I find myself repeating it, almost like a mantra.

It's satisfying to put out new music. And I think that's the context in which I'm comfortable revisiting things from the past.

I've always feel like it's been my place to offer an alternative.

Another one of my favourite sayings is, you can't handpick your audience. I feel like I'm making music for people who think like me about music, and that takes a lot of different forms. I could never generalise - but I think if I were to generalise, I'd think that you would say that most of my fans are music lovers who are looking for something outside of the mainstream: maybe a little bit hard to pin down, a little bit hard to categorise.

When I think about the stuff I turned down it's kind of insane.

Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.

I couldn't make a real drum'n'bass or dubstep record to save my life. But I can be influenced by them in small ways.

I don't hate what I love. I love what I love and I hate what I hate.

When I first pursued this with Universal, they had no idea what to do. But now that we've gone through the whole process and I've signed this 60-page document that says what we can and can't do, I suppose it will be a little bit easier for the next person.

Like a lot of other DJs, I've been wondering when the first DJ game was going to happen. Somebody even pitched me on their own idea and I thought, "I'm not a video game startup; I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this."

I think I would be much more enthusiastic about a band that covered more than just one particular album of mine. I don't ever really intend to record or to do shows with a live band. I don't really have a problem with it, but it doesn't really affect me either way.

When I'm looking for DJ sets and stuff to drop, I look for music that I feel is gonna get the reaction I want from the crowd.

One of my favorite things that Yahoo does on a regular basis is this story: "Wealthiest Rap Artists." That's an example of the internet just perpetuating this myth that we're all just sitting around in these mansions like Steven Tyler, bopping around in our swimming pool. It's bullshit.

If I wanted to contribute to the hyphy movement, what good is it making a hyphy record that isn't embraced by that community?

I've been on a major label for 14 years. I've always wanted as many people as possible to hear my music, and it definitely made sense for the majority of my career to be on a major label, on a distribution level, to be in people's faces and be out there, and have access to major labels' incredible machine, even though they have not understood or haven't been invested in what I was doing.

My main thing is constantly looking forward and trying to make music that I couldn't have made at any other time.

Things go wrong when the people who control that world stop listening to their own instincts and start catering to their fan base.

Just like on Guitar Hero, there are things that are similar and things that are not similar at all. When I first played DJ Hero, I wasn't very good. The control surface is similar in some ways to a turntable, but in other ways not at all the same.

The story I always recite - and have had to recite so many times over the years to different lawyers and different people within Universal - is that the business end of Mo'Wax was basically, like, 'Give us the big ones samples first, and we'll see how we get on.' And I gave them the six or seven that were, to me, the ones that were the scariest, and the biggest use. It wasn't about the big names, necessarily - although that played into it a bit, with people like Bjork and Metallica.

When I play that music live nowadays, there's a lot of things I feel I'd like to do - even things I don't think the audience is aware of, like layering subs underneath the kicks, and layering crisp hats underneath the muddy, trashy hats of the '90s. If I tried to play the music as it was next to my contemporary music, it just sounds like you're closing up half of the sonic spectrum.

To be honest, I didn't really get into making music to be an album artist.

I always like to remain a fan, put it that way: and I like to hold the idealised version of what these artists are like. Greed is one of those components of human nature that's inherent in everyone, and sometimes it is an unpleasant thing to engage in.

My core values are still the same about music, and my work ethic, and what I want to represent to people.

So, in addition to being a full-time father of two and everything else in life, it isn't so much that I'm sitting around plotting an album. I just kinda follow my muse and wherever my interests lie, and at some point I decide, "Right. It's been a while, time to figure out how to get serious and make some music."

Frequently, when I'm compared to someone, I'm like, "Is that really what people think I sound like?"

I always managed to fly a bit below the radar, but high enough to avoid colliding into anything.

I always consider every album to be a snapshot.

As for my store, most artists' sites send you to a third-party storefront like iTunes, whereas we're disseminating it ourselves. I was always uncomfortable with the thought of sending somebody who came to my site to buy something to some other store. It just occurred to me, "Why can't we do this?"

Anything that sparks some eight-year-old's interest in music or DJing is great.

Sometimes there's this balance: if you try to clear 10 things you'll probably get lucky and be able to clear most of them, or all of them; try to clear 20 things, in my mind there's gonna be at least one issue, maybe two - and then that's when it starts getting into either re-recording stuff, or you've got to take that song off.

The reason why it is that strong, and why HipHop is so inbred, is that there is a very structured wheel, a very definable system on how to get paid in HipHop. Busta Rhymes is someone who took that road and sure enough got paid. As long people like him are allowed to continue to do that it wont change. There is a very specific sound and a very specific attitude, and it changes every year, but as long as you stay in there and keep doing it, and keep narrowing your scope, dressing the rigt ways etc. you get paid.

I would agree with you that there's 90% imitation and 10% innovation. That's true of any genre.

People love drama, and if you aren't really interested in perpetuating that, it keeps you from exploding on a mainstream stage. I'm totally fine with that.

There are a lot of music startups that don't have anything to do with anyone's love for music. It has to do with them having a glorious IPO and then retiring to the Bahamas somewhere. It's important to keep that in mind.

I tend to gravitate away from the more trendy Ibiza style of dance music. It's not me.

I feel like you're being coy if you don't do something and celebrate the 20th or 25th anniversary in some way. Just as I've never, ever had any kind of embargo on playing songs from Endtroducing, no matter how much I wanted people to like my new stuff - I've never, ever stopped playing Endtroducing, for that reason as well. It's a give and take - it's a balance. If there's one theme, I guess, to this entire discussion, then it's that.

If you think of any long-term artist that makes music throughout several decades, you would hope that it's autobiographical and a form of self-expression, and that's certainly how I approach my music.

I would much rather people kick and scream and tear their hair out and accuse me of all kinds of blasphemy, than just have no opinion whatsoever.

I saw. I wanted to start my own store so people would know that what they were buying was real. There were bootlegs around at the time that had my name on the cover, but the music had nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to compare myself to [Jimmie] Hendrix, but back in the '70s, there were some Hendrix bootlegs.

I would rather have 10 people working on a record that are really committed and believe in it and love it, than 50 people who have no idea who I am or what I'm for.

I remember when the big shift happened in 1996-97, when suddenly it dawned on the music community: 'We should license our music to commercials and sell out for all intents and purposes. It doesn't really matter.'

I just felt, at the time, a little bit relieved, because I was kinda counting the days: 'Come on! Let's get these records into people's homes - nobody will ever be able to get them all back, and it'll be an artefact out in the world.'

I realized that people don't quite understand what I do when I was the new kid on the block and a lot of Hollywood was offering me fairly cheesy projects.

I still consider myself a consumer of music more than anything else.

I don't care if I get kicked out of every rich kid club on the planet. I will never sacrifice my integrity as a DJ...ever.

When I make music, it takes me two hours to get into the flow. To me it's like tapping into some kind of subconscious frequency: I just have to turn everything else off, open up part of myself, expose my fears and try to work through it in the music that I'm making.

I have a natural fear of anything that feels like celebrating my own past to an extent that doesn't allow me to continue to look forward. I don't know psychologically why it is, but I get a little uncomfortable with nostalgia.

You can be a great DJ and still be not very good at DJ Hero. And vice-versa: You can have never spun in your life on real turntables and be fine on DJ Hero.

There's any number of DJs who have inspired me over the years. I don't actively go out in clubs, so I can't tell you if there's some hot new talent out there who everybody's aware of but I'm not.

I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.

Everything right now tends to be the same and very aggressive, and I think people are getting a little burned out on it.

I think a band - even a band that's been around as long as the Rolling Stones - I think that's still the formula. You know you're gonna get those songs, and you don't mind sitting through the ones that you maybe don't know very well because you know they're not gonna let you down - they're not gonna mess with you. And I kind of feel the same way about the way I structure my shows.

Yeah, I do. HipHop was, though I would not say all, cause I try to keep myself open to other things, but nearly all I listend to for the last 14 years of my life.

In certain cases I don't want to sell tracks individually; I want to only sell the whole album. With simple things like that I just don't get any response [from iTunes]. I don't want to kill iTunes - I just want to offer my own retail experience in my own tiny corner of the Internet.

I'm not going to get on any anti-corporation soapbox to an extreme level.

I was sort of like a kid in a candy store, realizing it was fun making beats without the perceived burden that every track I did had to be a some progressive sample masterpiece. It was nice to blow off steam and work on those songs. For me, that’s what 'The Outsider' was about in general: forget everything, I’m just gonna follow my own music, and make the music I want to make.

The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.

I've always been compared to people. It's a revolving cast that comes and goes - obviously, sometimes people stay.

If I have a chance to positively impact how the populace views DJs, then I'm going to try to do my part to nudge things in the right direction.

My problem with iTunes is that I don't have any say in how I'm represented on the site.