A Quote by Mark Foster
We've grown up on the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Blur and Bowie and the Clash. Also E.L.O. and Hall and Oates. Those are all artists who write songs that are accessible but still left of center. It's intelligent pop. There's still something different and complex about it.
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I look at bands like the Beach Boys, Hall & Oates and Blur, and those are the bands I want to be in company with because their songwriting is intelligent, and yet you don't need to be a musical genius to pick it up.
There isn't one album that says 'Hall & Oates.' It's always 'Daryl Hall and John Oates.' From the very beginning. People never note that. The idea of 'Hall & Oates,' this two-headed monster, this thing, is not anything we've ever wanted or liked.
I've been criticized by my generation, artists from the '70s - and there's nothing more tragic than artists from the '70s still doing art from the '70s - because I blur all these borders between fashion and pop.
Not to name names, but a lot of pop female artists you see, they don't write their own songs. Lot of top male artists and boy band artists, they don't write their own songs. They're just a product. They sell, they sell, they sell. They don't care about musical integrity, any of that kind of stuff.
Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
If I completely understood what was going on and I understood these songs, they wouldn't make sense to play live anymore. They're still enigmatic for me. I'm still searching in the songs as they are. That's what's actually been the most fun about playing and touring for me is that there's still a lot of caverns in the songs where you can go and hide out different nights.
People just didn't write songs that were so directly emotional in those days. They still don't. Part of Hank's [Williams] thing was that he was opening up about relationships between men and women in ways that nobody else did, and I think that's something that made him stand out so much. His songs are just so straightforward about these really deep feelings that are universal, but they're so hard to write about without sounding sappy or over the top. You think of men in that era - they didn't express themselves that way.
Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.
I was a Beach Boys guy, but I was won over. In '64, as the radio stations were creating this duel between The Beatles and The Beach Boys, I slowly but surely got won over by the Mop Tops.
I've reinvented myself every year since 1998, and my style's still changing. It's grittier now. I always gotta try something new. I've grown up. Then I was rapping; now I do music, I write albums. But my distinctive voice and style, people still can't catch it. They're still asking me, "What were you saying on that song?".
The momentum of my creative life and intellectual growth is still the momentum of breaking out of fundamentalism. Because of that, I'm very grateful for it. But I'm also grateful that at the center of it was something that I still believe to be true - those fundamentals of faith.
If it is a good song, it is a good song. The Beatles were pop, the beach boys were pop and it's the best music of all time.
I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time
about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness.
Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they're still musicians, and they're still making art.
When I pull into a city and I rent a car and it's Nashville, or it's London, or I'm driving in the taxi to the hotel, and on comes one of my songs, it's like, 'Oh my God, they're still playing these songs on the radio.' And you still feel tearful and very grateful that somebody still likes these songs that you made up.
A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.
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