A Quote by Ira Kaplan

As the fans' voting reflected, people want to hear your best-known songs. — © Ira Kaplan
As the fans' voting reflected, people want to hear your best-known songs.

Quote Author

Ira Kaplan
Born: January 7, 1957
I like albums where all the songs are written in one go. If you're trying to create the number-one album with the best songs ever, I get why you'd want to write for three years and pick the best ones, but for me, I'd rather hear a group of songs that are all expressing a state, or time of your life. I think it's more that.
Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel, and I want to be successful and reach a big audience. I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world; I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another.
It's almost like my career has been [based on voting]. I won a dancing contest to get into wrestling. That involved fans voting. And then on Dancing with the Stars, fans were voting.
I realized that, all along, my theory was right: Make music that you want to hear, and instead of having fans that one day might criticize or abandon you, your fans aren't even fans. They're people with tastes similar to yours. They're friends you haven't met yet.
Since I am an avid singer and a lot of my fans want to hear me sing, I thought it will be really nice to sing my songs online so that more people could watch me, and I thought digital is the best way to connect with everyone.
I think it's important for fans to be involved in all aspects of the game. We saw the league certainly make that move towards involving fans with pro bowl voting, I'm not sure that fan voting will ever be a part of the Hall of Fame, but it is always interesting to get the perspective of the fans.
When you write songs for your best friends and maybe two other people to hear, and then realize that a million other people are going to hear them, it can be a bit worrying. You get concerned about what you might reveal.
It's hard to be in the limelight and write songs that cater to fans that have expectations of you. We just want to write songs that we love, but all the different people with different ideas coming in make it difficult. We have to ask ourselves if we're writing for the most important people: the fans.
It's so amazing to hear a crowd of people singing one of your songs. It's the best feeling.
I'm giving my fans the songs that they want to hear from me. Why do we love to hear ourselves being downgraded. Why do we love to hear the negative situations that we see in our lives daily? I'm not trying to make sense of it, I'm not giving any solutions, I'm just tossing the question.
In a very broad statement, or mentality, you just want as many fans as you can have of your music. You want people to write songs for and connect with and play shows for.
I've always tried to stay away from doing remixes to songs that were popular, because too many people do that. But that's something the fans want to hear, me over those type of beats. So I do it for them.
We never do the same set twice... We play for at least two and a half hours, sometimes longer, so there's a lot of songs from all the records. And we know there's a stable we as fans would want to hear, so we always give them, then we change up a bunch of songs and throw in a couple new ones.
A lot of the hardcore fans wanna hear the deep cuts - songs like 'Orion' or maybe like a 'Disposable Heroes' - you know, songs that we don't play all the time - and then, of course, they wanna hear 'Sandman' and 'Nothing Else Matters' and some of the hits.
It's kind of strange to hear your songs sung back to you! You get a big insight into what people connect to, what's moving to people or what songs people are really into.
It's not a bad problem to have because a lot of classic acts are known for one or two songs and in their show they basically hold those songs off until the end and you sit through an hour or so of lesser known material but in our case most of the songs are well known.
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