A Quote by Kate Pierson

Usually, when we write in The B-52s, it's quite a collaborative process. We really take hours - and sometimes days - jamming, and then we listen and listen to them and go, 'Oh, let's use this part, and then this part.' It's really like a collage.
I'll take two months off just to listen to records and not do any music so I can absorb all that and then when I go do my music. It's all in me. I'll listen to a different genre every two days or something, study it, 24 hours straight.
I don't really write. I'm an on-the-spot type of person. This beat, let's listen to it; let's vibe. And then I'll do a melody, and then we'll go back and do it.
For the most part, I really love being in a collaborative thing. And in a collaborative thing if you have a singer as good as Sean Smith or Eddie Vedder, you kind of think, well, why don't you just go ahead and let them sing? People seem to really like it.
For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.
I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.
A lot of people use collaborative technologies badly, then abandon them. They aren't 'plug-and-play.' The invisible part is the social skill necessary to use them.
Back in high school, I had this folk protest band, and I used to write all the time. And then, when I got in The B-52s, we began to write collectively, collaboratively - most all of our songs are written by jamming together.
I get really worried, like if they say, 'Take vocal lessons,' or something because it's kind of like I used to really love to draw when I was a kid and then I took like an art class - because everyone said, 'Oh, you're so good, you should take a class and maybe you can be really good,' and then I went to the class and then they showed me how to use a ruler and perspective and all this stuff and it totally made me not want to do it at all.
The nature of making music and making art, what motivates me is that it's interesting. It's interesting to listen, to really listen to other people's point-of-view. Take in their work. Listen to the way they sing. Listen to the way they write lyrics. What they are trying to express.
Listen - life is really going on, right now, around us. Do you see it? Sometimes I lose it but if I sit still and listen, it comes back, and then I think, How funny, this is what being alive is.
Occasionally you get that one person that says "I really like that one part of this joke" and you go, "Oh thank you that's my favorite part too." But no, in order for it to be authentic hopefully you have jokes that everyone can just get on board with and then you have a few things for yourself.
A big marker in my life was realizing you could record sound: I liked to make little recordings and then go back and listen to them. It becomes something outside of you then and you can listen to it objectively.
Sometimes you think, "Oh man, this is going to be a fantastic movie," and then when you see it put together, you're like, "Oh, huh. Well, that didn't turn out quite the way I thought." Sometimes you think you're part of a project and it isn't that great, and then it sort of becomes a pleasant surprise. But I think there's just too many elements that affect the tone of a movie, so I think even for a director, it may be hard to gauge that.
Wagner always opens you a second breath, and then you go on, and you are absolutely into his musical world, and you can't stop, and you can listen for four hours, five hours, six hours, and then you are like in his mystical hands of his music. He's such a great poet of music.
What I've found in my life with our children is that often you can give them advice and tell them to eat the right things, stay in shape and wear sunscreen, and they don't really want to listen. But then they hear it from someone else, and they do listen.
So, I'll walk around with - just an iPhone will work - but sometimes I'll bring, like, a little mobile recorder and I'll just, like, if hear an interesting sound, I'll just record it. And then later, I'll listen through them and I'll go like, 'I wonder how can I use that?'
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