Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Rostam Batmanglij - Page 2

In the West we are constantly hit with music of Middle Eastern descent signifying terror, intrigue or sorrow.

The original 'Don't Let It Get to You' started with a beat. The drums came first. All the musical and lyrical elements were written over those drums.

I would hope to make a record that interacts with culture in a macro sense. That is something to aspire to.

I was listening 'Plastic Ono Band,' the John Lennon album a lot, and that might have had some inspiration on me.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

I never felt like there were things I couldn't express lyrically in Vampire Weekend. I was always proud of everything that we wrote together.

I'm very conscious of the fact that I devoted my life to recording music, recordings and writing songs.

Radio or no radio, I just like the way records sound when the drums and vocals are loud.

I think when I work with artists, I'm at their service, and I'm at the service of either their vision or a vision that we find together and we share.

I like there to be some secrets.

I don't have to just have one kind of life. I can have several different creative lives.

I'd like to make an album with Slack one day. I'd like to use it as a collaborative tool. I know about it because I have friends that work in tech, and I guess you can use it in any job.

I tend to use different microphones, different mic techniques, and different recording mediums - like analogue tape - that evoke multiple eras of recorded music at the same time.

I think that all music is inherently political, and, at the same time, I'm interested in the politics of inclusion not exclusion. So I think that my goal is to make music that anybody can hear and feel moved by.

There's a joy I get from collaborating with other artists, and there's a joy I get from making songs on my own.

I've had experiences where my life will try to tell me something in a dream and sometimes it's something I'm not ready to hear.

The thing I love about car design is that it's sculpture everybody appreciates, everybody has access to.

I figured out that it was important for me to have my identity, just live independently and like being myself, musically.

When an old tape machine makes pitch wobble, some people would say that compromises fidelity and would try to get rid of it. But to me that wobble adds richness, it instantly brings back the feelings you associate with old recordings.

I was fascinated by the word 'Rudy,' which is connected to the Jamaican term 'rude boy,' which migrated from Jamaica to London. I was also fascinated by that name, because it exists in Persian culture and Iranian culture. There is actually a place called Rudy in Iran, and there's Iranians that I know with the name Rudy.

I feel like when I was in college I was listening to the Walkmen a lot and I actually have a memory of having a dream and in the dream I saw the Walkmen perform with saxes.

Shangri-La is one of the few studios in which you can sit in the control room and open a window behind you. You can feel the light and the air coming off the ocean. You can have a musical world in front of you and the natural world behind you.

I love being able to record in a room that's surrounded by trees.

I feel like I've had this ability to infiltrate, as an outsider and an insider, different groups.

I'm interested in making art that is available to everybody.

There's a bunch of rules that I want to break. I have a rule-breaking streak.

There is a sense of tranquility that I think people can get from being in an organized group, where a singular leader handles the responsibilities of individual thinking.

I'm always making beats, and when I can hear Ezra singing on one of them in my head, I send it to him. That's one of the ways that we've always worked together.

Classical music can be catchy, so can African instrumental guitar music. It's not just pop songs that are catchy. Rhythms can be catchy, too.

I always felt more connected with people who are proud of who they are.

I think that's the only way I know how to write songs, is to think about my life, and also to think about the words at the same time.

There are rules that are so blatantly broken on 'Contra,' like structures of harmony and texture.

I can pass as a lot of things: people meet me and don't think I'm gay and speak about gay people in a certain way or they don't know I'm Middle Eastern and do the same.

Yeah, I'd always wanted to do a song with finger-picked, nylon-string guitar.

On the song 'Step,' the chorus is Ezra is singing into my laptop with the laptop microphone, and you can hear the trains going by my apartment, but we liked the quality of that recording.

You want the personality of each performer - whether it's singing or bass or drums or piano - to be intact. In some ways it's much more challenging to preserve that and to also make music that sounds modern.

When I work with other artists, I really want to bring out the most in their voices and I want to hold myself to the same standard.

Films should involve a director's idiosyncrasies as much as possible I think.

It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

I thought it would be interesting to play classical music on rock instruments.

I had no problem working for 15 hours straight when I was producing someone else, but I couldn't do it with my own songs. It took that moment of pointing the camera at myself to realize that it was okay to get lost in making my own music. I think before that I was scared of pushing myself to the point of staring into the abyss.

We've always said that our band is pretty much an open system and there's no rules governing anything... so who knows what the future will hold?

There's a line in the Arthur Russell documentary where his partner talks about how Arthur is really interested in process. He never felt like anything was finished, and he would even work on things after they'd been released. I definitely relate to that.

Obviously it always takes longer to finish an album than you think it will. That's always going to be the case. Everything takes longer than you think it will. Occasionally things happen fast.

I like the idea that a song can be about a romantic relationship, but it can also about a relationship to your career, or a relationship to your city. It can be about a person, but at the same time it can be about a situation.

I would say I was a little bit outgoing, a little bit shy. I was definitely much more shy than my brother. I was young - age six. I was really drawn to music because my brother started playing instruments and I wanted to be at his level, even though I was younger.

I wanted to make an album where every song is kind of interacting - where you can't tell what's the string arrangement and what's the song. I guess that came out of going to college, majoring in music, studying classical music, and even as a kid, being really drawn to classical music.

As far as the lyrics go, I think I was negotiating a moment in my life where I didn't feel happy. I think I had some existential frustration and I was wrestling with that on a few different levels. I was feeling like I wanted to change a lot of things.

At some point I decided I didn't want to learn any more guitar technique. I was at that level where the next mountain there was to climb was Van Halen and I didn't really like Van Halen.

I did take guitar lessons as a teenager, though, and I started to teach myself how to play everything I could play on the guitar on piano, so I had a really weird, non-traditional route to proficiency. I think it probably helped me come at things from a new angle.

My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

'Unbelievers' was a song that we felt like we could tackle, so that's one of the reasons we wanted to start playing it live, we really believed in that song and we still believe in that song a lot.

I was lucky to have a guitar teacher who asked me what I wanted to learn. I brought in "High & Dry" by Radiohead and "Mr. Jones" by Counting Crows and he was like, "Alright, I'm gonna teach you these, but you're also gonna learn some stuff that I want you to learn." He taught me Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, so I was getting the technical stuff and the fun stuff.

I guess I have some kind of a visceral connection with drums. I'm looking to create music that people can react to viscerally, and people will respond to viscerally. I think that you can listen to music, to a song you've never heard before and not really like it, but also feel like you're responding to it physically whether you like it or not. I think that's a powerful aspect about music, and I think that's something that draws me to drums.

I think summer, at least as I've experienced it, can be joyous but it can also be tough emotionally. Physically, it can be hot to the point of being unbearable and I think you want to capture that frustration, but also the release.

It's hard to say how time factors into your work, because sometimes things will come to you very quickly, but it will take years for the ideas to be gestating in your mind.

I feel connected to every song on this record [ 'Modern Vampires Of The City' ], but yeah I think there's something special about 'Young Lion'. It's pretty different from any song that we've had before because the vocals are kind of between two different very simple instrumental piano melodies and it's almost like something that we call a vignette, it's sort of like a miniature.

I took one piano lesson and hated it and then didn't take any piano lessons until I was 18.

Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats. I was starting to learn the signifiers of production from the '60s, the '80s. We never re-recorded anything. All the record companies that wanted to sign us - except for one - were excited about the recordings that we had done ourselves.

It took me some time to join the various streams of making music that was technically good and making music that made me feel good.