A Quote by Lou Barlow

The minute we first started recording 'Defend Yourself,' I thought, 'Yeah. We're going to have to deal with a really terrible review from Pitchfork for this record.'
The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!
When I first got my record deal, I was like, 'I just want to sing,' and I never put much thought into what really goes into a record. But as I got older, I developed a passion for writing.
The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I said, "At last someone understands what permaculture's about."
When I first started recording music, we would record in the closet with socks on the mic.
I don't know, whenever someone was like, 'Yeah, I'm going to the studio,' I just went with them. And I started recording.
I think, actually, I was the first person to ever sign a simultaneous video and recording deal with a record company.
My first songs, I would just record them on this little tape recorder, and then I didn't start recording songs I really liked until my friend gave me a 4-track (recorder) and that's when my ideas really started coming together.
I most definitely wanted to make a record out of it. Due to the fact of the negativity and things that transitioned over the years, I just wanted to give [Chris Rivers] his space. I had this record "Danger" which Free Smith produced the beat. It was one of the first beats I got when I started recording again and one of the first I sang to.
I started writing out all of my feelings, and people asked me, 'Have you ever thought of recording your music?' It was something I'd always thought of, but I'd never really had the confidence.
When we first started recording, it was before rock, so people thought we were hillbilly hicks. That was something we had to deal with; the girls didn't think we were cool, although they did a few years later. We had ducktails and wore peg-leg pants. We looked like rock n' rollers.
The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event.
When I first started recording music, I was actually singing about microphones, equipment, recording.
I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'
I'm a terrible actor. I'm still learning. When I first started, I wish I knew then to trust myself more, really. I was in a terrible panic in the early part of my career.
I always knew I wanted to do music, but it took me a long time to figure out how to exactly do that. With my first record deal, everything kinda fell apart. I wasn't ready for it, I didn't know how to handle the business side at all. I thought as soon as I got a record deal, everything would fall into place and I wouldn't have to really do any work anymore. I could just make music, and be successful. Well that was not the case and everything fell apart for a period of time.
My first record deal was an independent record deal back in 1995 or early 1996.
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