A Quote by Brent Faiyaz

I've always felt like I was observing everything, like I'm just looking out of the window, peeping how everybody is living and just penning about it, so I made the album about that concept.
I felt like I've needed to ask my parents up until about four years ago about everything. They have helped me tremendously, I came out of college with no debt. Everything they made, they just poured into my education.
You live in an apartment in New York, and you think all the time about like, 'I don't even know who's living above me.' There are all these anonymous people in that window or that window or that window, and everybody has their own interesting life that I know nothing about.
I always wanted to make a song like 'Why' even before my second album. It was just something I always had in my mind. But when I got the beat from Havoc, it was like the perfect beat, I felt... I wanted to get some questions I thought everybody... felt like 'why?' to.
I was talking to my dad about the stuff he grew up listening to, and 'Operation: Mindcrime' is a record that he had always talked about around the house. He always talked about it as the 'greatest concept album of all time.' One day, I started listening to it, and it just hit me. I was like, 'These songs are all hits. They're all huge songs.'
I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, 'Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?' I was like, 'I'd rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.' I always felt like an artist as well.
I look like I'm not listening, but I'm actually listening. I like listening to everything, observing everybody, just taking everything in, and then, in my mind, figuring out what's good for me and what's bad for me.
America's not just [about] looking out for yourself, it's not just about greed, it's not just about trying to climb to the very top and keep everybody else down. ... Hard work, that's a value. Looking out for one another, that's a value. The idea that we're all in it together and [that] I'm my brother's keeper and [my] sister's keeper, that's a value.
I'm a diehard animal lover - I've always loved animals - but it was just one of those trips that I felt like I was going back to the beginning of where earth started. At the time, where a lot of stuff was brewing anyway, to be in such a beautiful and barren land, and just looking at how life began with all these creatures, I just started to really think about animals and time and just all of it.
Tommy had felt alone in a crowd before, even inferior to everyone in a crowd, but now he felt, well, different. It wasn't just the clothes and the make up, it was the humanity. He wasn't part of it. Heightened senses or not, he felt like he had his nose pressed against the window, looking in. The problem was, it was the window of a donut shop.
Sometimes you just want to go out and tell everybody everything because you're just so full of happiness. It's almost like you're high on it and you just want to tell everybody about your experience, but you're not allowed to say anything.
The Bring the Noise buzz was so strong, so we put it out on a release called 'Attack of the Killer B's' which was a record made up of B-sides and things like that - so it wasn't out on our new album, you know what I mean? But we always felt strongly about it.
Kinda when I stopped eating was on our second album, just as it felt like everything was so out of control.
I feel like now fashion is just part of how I think about everything. When I send out a mood board to our contributors every month about our monthly theme, there are photos from our fashion shows, but there are also film stills and album art.
Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.
Every culture has beauty and decorations of body. This is not of itself superficial, this is very human. Decorating when it becomes out of balance, when it becomes about the materialism, about how many shoes, how many handbags, how expensive they are, and the status, then it's no longer just about an expression or looking beautiful, that's more about 'I HAVE MONEY, I AM RICH'. It felt out of balance.
There's something about seeing a movie that you like, and being able to see the scenes that didn't make it, just as a window into the process of how choices are made and how a movie is made. To me, the idea of getting to have the scenes on the DVD is very exciting.
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