When I'm in writing mode I tend not to listen to music. I usually have a gestation period before I start writing. When I'm listening, it usually happens on the road. So, we'd been listening to a lot of music on tour the year before and all that stuff sank in.
I grew up listening to a lot of emo music, a lot of rock music, a lot of rap music, a lot of trap music, funk, everything.
The only music I was listening to for ages was old soul. So I wasn't listening to a lot of new music - especially indie music.
I grew up listening to a lot of Malaysian pop music, which is kind of like a mixture of traditional and pop... I was also listening to a lot of English music as well.
Honestly, I've been reading a lot of books on visual art. I've been reading a lot of books by Olivia Lang, I've been listening to a lot of folk and singer-songwriter music, but also a lot of electronic and really hard techno. I'm just trying to create something that pulls from everywhere and that hopefully feels unique.
In most of my films I write the music into the script. I'm listening to songs and lyrics that empower the themes of the film. There's a lot of Indigenous music that has not been heard widely and I love the idea of giving that music to the rest of the world.
When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.
People are making a lot of music and higher and higher quality. I can't say the same thing for how people are listening to music. People are hearing music through terrible speakers, little computer speakers, there's a lot to get back to in terms of hi-fi and people listening to better quality, technically better quality music.
I just became obsessed with looking for new singers, unknown singers, people that maybe have been forgotten, and really checking them out and analyzing what they do - and obsessive listening. I think that's the core of my work on music - has been just listening to things and listening to singers.
I realized a lot of my friends were going to nightclubs and listening to house music. I was hanging out with them and going to clubs as well but I didn't really understand that kind of music. I was listening to country music and was heavily into Hank Williams, bluegrass, and Bob Dylan. So I just decided I really needed to understand what this music I was hearing in the clubs was all about.
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
So when I'm listening to music, I'm listening to a lot of hip-hop to be inspired and to hear new things.
I've been listening to quite a lot of classical music like Erik Satie, and quite a lot of blues.
Back in Kuwait, I had started listening to a lot of English language music: western music, I would say - Kate Bush and Radiohead - and I loved Chet Baker, Etna James, a lot of singers and a lot of bands.
If anything I think we connect to what our parents were listening to when they were our age. I'm listening to a lot of classical and electronic music, like Aphex Twin, non-vocal music.
I started listening to rap music in 2012 or something, because that was when I started becoming friends with American people, and they showed me rappers to listen to. I actually started listening to Macklemore a lot. He's the first rapper I started listening to.