A Quote by Curt Smith
We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.
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When I was a teenager, I got into four track recorders, drum machines, and synthesizers, and I started producing instrumental music.
Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.
In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.
I made an electronic record in the vein of Cluster. I was programming synthesizers and drum machines and that sort of thing.
What I really love is touring on a bus with my band playing shows every night and feeling the audience, feeling the presence of people actually listening to my music. Feeding my soul is what touring feels like for me and I absolutely refuse to have a bad time doing something I really, really love.
I have mostly software synthesizers and software drum machines. I'm very lazy. I don't really like to plug in a lot of equipment and external boxes and everything.
There where hundreds of graves. There where hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair.
I just look up to anyone who made music back then because you really had to be a musician. There were no samples or drum machines. Those people back in the day paved the way for people like me.
I was listening to a lot of really early house music tracks. Like Chicago house and Detroit. And Marshall Jefferson has a track probably from 1980 - somewhere around there - that doesn't actually have any electronic instruments, no drum machines, nothing. Just a drummer and a piano player and they're playing this house music, but they're actually playing it. I really love that aesthetic and wanted to bring that into the album.
I've always been good about interfacing with machines. But that never seemed like a gateway to being able to make music. I never made the connection that music could be made with machines - that was what drum and bass was for me.
So many people have told me that it's quite different playing out in the States, and obviously, as a musician, touring in the States is kind of the Holy Grail.
The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians with all the blood. That's not a level playing field. That's a slaughter. And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of times more than they can use.
This is show business, and there's room for the shows and the personalities. But I think there's also room for music, for people to play music, and there seems to be an audience developing that's willing to go listen to music again, rather than just be blown away by drum machines and choreography.
To my dismay, inadequate signage, non-ADA compliant ramps, narrow doorways, and poorly-placed voting machines are preventing hundreds of thousands of people from exercising one of our most basic rights as Americans.
Unfortunately, like, homework and school wasn't the thing that I was obsessing over. It was, you know, music and making music and how to like - and drum machines. And we met Rick Rubin, and Rick Rubin had a drum machine. So I would just cut school and go to his house - his dorm room.
You're feeling the responsibility for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people on your shoulder in a way that I couldn't feel as lieutenant governor.
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