A Quote by Bryce Dessner

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.
What's funny about my voice is, no matter what I sing, I sound like I'm really sad. I don't even mean to do it, it's just something my voice has. I think that's one of the reasons why Okkervil has been dubbed as really mopey - I have this tone to my voice that sounds like that.
I just think about what I am doing on my side of the net, which requires focus. Even after all the years I've been playing, I still get butterflies before each match.
I love using lots of different pedals in the studio because you have the time to experiment with sounds. But when you're singing, fronting a rock band, and playing, you don't really want to have to think about a lot of that stuff.
I just think that when you've been singing for 30 years, which I have been, you just want to find different things you can do with your voice. It's a constant journey. It's not like any one album that you make is who you are. It just reflects that particular day.
The historical relationship between Christians and Jews for most of the two thousand years of Christianity has not been good and it's been mostly persecution by Christians of Jews - not all the time, not every place, but mostly it's been that. I think that's just a terribly regretful thing. I don't see it anywhere in the Scriptures that I read, that Christians are to persecute Jews. I think it's been quite damaging. I think it's been a bad witness.
It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point.
I'm trying to see if I can speak about our society today, but I cannot speak about the theme, because it's a bit difficult. I'm just starting to work on that. Because we live in a kind of world which has drastically changed in the last years. We speak about globalization, and how it's become the reason for everything. It has a kind of deep meaning. To be everywhere and to be nowhere at the same time. You think to globalize, you think, the Earth, it's your country. No, it's not your country. It's not easy to catch it in a cinema. It's too huge.
Most people like the sad songs. Some of the oldest songs known to man are sad. Listening to a voice singing something sad is a really great way to help you to feel sad when you need to.
Also in Norah Jones, now there's a voice that sounds and I don't mean disrespect but sounds a hundred years old that sounds incredibly experienced. It's just an exciting time.
I would love to have a chat with Michael Jackson. For the sole purpose of seeing if he has a deep voice or not. A lot of people say he actually had a deep baritone, but then on TV he always had the high pitched squeaky voice. I would love to spend some time with him.
The whole thing of singing on my own has been accidental and random. I sang a huge amount as a kid, and I was a boy soprano. I didn't do that much classical music; I did a little bit. I had a lovely voice. And then when my voice dropped, I didn't worry about it consciously because I wasn't that invested in my singing at the time.
The music defied classification. If I had been writing a review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive, guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars didn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds. The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feel it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid, where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky. That’s the only way I could describe the music. It was the sonic equivalent of flight.
I find it sad that people think it's a political, gender-bending thing, because, really, I'm just singing about guys. There's a million guys singing about girls, and no one makes a big deal of it.
I remember growing up singing; even when I was just three years old, I was singing all the time in the house. My parents said I was singing before I could even talk properly.
I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.
I'm a natural baritone, so I had challenges in that middle range, which would be that tenor area, singing in my natural voice. And I worked on that. But basically the falsetto thing, I didn't even know it was a falsetto until a music teacher commented on it, that I had a very nice falsetto. I didn't even know what it was. I said, 'Oh, OK.'
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