Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Lou Barlow
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Lou Barlow.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
It's kind of crazy how music helped me overcome the anxieties that I have.
With every performance I just feel more energized somehow. Like, this is how I exercise! This is how I feed my ego, by playing this loud rock music.
That's what I've figured out over the years - the way I write makes people feel uncomfortable.
Literally everything I do is either write songs and play music, or I'm immersed in my domestic life.
I look forward to so many things about going to Japan. The shows are early. It's great! They're really early, so it helps make dealing with jetlag a little easier.
I wrote a song for my sister's wedding.
I was cripplingly shy. When I was in high school, my teachers thought I was mentally disabled because I wouldn't be able to say anything or do anything. They thought I didn't speak.
To be doing interviews in 2006 for a band I was kicked out of in 1989 - a band that I never thought I would play for again - in a way, it's weird.
I've always tried to make music for someone who's never heard anything I've ever done.
It's cool to think about nursing, because a lot of people decide to go into it later in their lives. I could slip into school to be an LPN or an RN as a middle-aged man, and it wouldn't be unusual.
I'm the haphazard engineer of my own music.
At 12 or 13, I picked up a guitar because my mother made me learn how to play.
Coming back to Dinosaur Jr. and actually writing songs for the band was really intense for me.
Now, when I have a four-string that I take on the road with me, it's a regular Martin. I bought a decent Martin with a pickup in it, and then I just take off the strings and have four strings on it.
Harmony Korine, the screenwriter, was really into my early work. I did a lot of stuff under the name Sentridoh and a lot of 4-track cassette stuff that he was into.
From when I young, a lot of the things I grappled with, with instruments, was how large they were. When someone places a large guitar in your lap, it's hard - I'd learned how to play a guitar when I was a kid, but I never really felt like I was in control.
I've learned by experience that, if I get too clever with lyrics, or if I'm not totally embodying my own wants and needs in the songs, I can't remember them.
I've managed to alienate most of what would be considered the core audience that I'm supposed to have had.
I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.
If you put heavy, regular classic guitar strings on a baritone ukulele, it gets pretty low. It has a really nice, low, warm feel to it.
I always felt weird. I don't feel particularly likeable.
To bicker over what could have been is silly.
I'm the Folk Implosion's biggest fan.
At nine or ten, I was playing guitar in music class in my elementary school in Jackson, Michigan. They had a guitar class, and I played with ten of my classmates, and we did a little guitar orchestra for a school music.
I wrote 'Healthy Sick,' from our first LP, when I was 19. I'll happily play it till I'm 91 because it always feels good and truthful.
It just takes me awhile to get comfortable in any situation.
I always felt that when people found things that they didn't like about me, it seemed to distance them from me.
Someone who's a really good engineer is someone who's a little bit smarter than you but who also listens to you and doesn't impose agendas.
I prefer to read into other people's songs what I want to hear in them.
Simplicity is at the core of Sebadoh.
When I was a teenager, my mom got me a really nice baritone ukulele.
Every show I play is like a little celebration of something in my life that has gone really well.
Young bands are so angry. There are young bands that are so incredibly successful, getting incredible reviews, and they are totally angry.
I don't really have friends in general. I never have. I didn't go to college and didn't have friends in high school.
I don't focus on one thing. I play guitar and bass and keyboards and drums, but I never stay on anything long enough to become a specialist at it.
I have to focus and keep things together as much as anyone with a real job... It's just that I know, from experience, that the more fun I have doing something that the more successful it will be.
I don't know if i have a 'take' on L.A. The music community is enormous, from the studio musicians to the bands trying to 'make it' to the indie bands... so many bands... it can be overwhelming. But it seems healthy.
I like to collaborate with other people for studio recordings because I believe collaboration, in any form, makes music better.
I hear people telling me a lot that the production of that particular record - 'One Part Lullaby' - really influenced them. I'm like, 'What? We were dropped from the label after that!'
I really don't have a method. I gravitate towards the organic/acoustic, but I still often complete songs musically before attempting to find the lyric.
I'm a huge Zombies fan.
I went back and reread the Dinosaur chapter in 'Our Band Could Be Your Life,' and it was so depressing.
My experience with Dino Jr. proved that making new music was a worthwhile pursuit.
When I first started writing songs, I did play with my fingers, and I had these kind of weird strums. There's, like, three or four strumming patterns that seemed kind of unique to me.
When you're in a band, it's kind of a big thing to be friends as well.
I can finish a show and walk through the audience without being recognized.
My family is the epicenter of my life.
For me, it's hard to enter any situation with people where we're considering everyone equals, because I bring all of this massive baggage into anything that I do, preconceptions of my work. That's a lot for the people that I might be bringing along with me to bear.
'One Part Lullaby.' It was our big major-label record. People reference it quite a bit, but it did absolutely nothing. It's like the 'Kids' soundtrack. It did nothing. It didn't start anything for me.
Los Angeles was really beautiful, and California in general is a great place to live.
People in the Midwest, there's a lot of regional pride and a lot more, like, fake positivity - 'That's great - you're awesome!'
Most of the times that I've written break-up songs, it's been different because I was always trying to get back to something: get back to a situation or talk my way or sing my way back into the relationship.
J. makes me laugh. He's incredibly dry and has a pretty harsh sense of humor that I enjoy.
My voice is not very dynamic.
I had a very strong 'revertigo' for becoming the kid that I was when I was in Dinosaur Jr. That's a pretty insecure place that I was in.
I've been trying to cut down on caffeine because it seems to aggravate my middle-age-onset acne, but I'm too tired to care. I'm growing a beard to hide it.
The first songs I ever wrote - my first, like, serious offerings - were all written on ukulele. It's always been a part of the way I write for a really long time.
Some people play steel string beautifully, but I'm not exactly a world-class picker.
I think all food except for maybe pizza and Mexican food is better in Japan.
Early on, I really liked the idea of being confrontational. I loved the idea of making songs that made people really uncomfortable.
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