A Quote by Mustard

I could do beats with a million sounds, and I could do beats with two sounds. Which one is going to make the most sense, and which one is going to sell the most records? Most of the time, it's the simplicity.
Most artists are making as much money now as they could have made... in the heyday of Def Jam [when the] Beastie Boys would sell 10 million records or DMX would sell 6 or 7 million records. Those records are one thing, but then all the other ways to exploit the emotional relationship between artist and community is so much greater that I would guess that they're making as much or more money than they could have ever made.
The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want.
I turn on the machines and start to think about ideas and take it from there, it usually begins if it's a beat, a track creating a beat/beats and then the bass-line/lines, then comes the sounds--drones, atmospherics etc, then the edits of various sounds I created and keep going till I feel I have enough sounds ideas to start working and building a track. I have many banks of sounds that we hear that can be manipulated in the machines.
How can you build a relationship when you're just sending out beats? Most people will come in and play their beats, but I like to make mine on the spot.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, out number the sand grains in the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. The number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist... we are privileged to be alive and nd we should make the most of our time on this world.
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
I get most of my inspiration from older records. Most of the records that I listen to were probably made before I was born, and I was born in the mid-'70s. I don't know why, exactly, I'm drawn to those sounds.
When I first starting making beats, I didn't know samples were being used in any beats. I had no idea where producers were getting the real string sounds or the voices on their tracks. I knew nothing about loops or sampling off of records. So, by me knowing nothing about this it made me concentrate on my chords on the keyboard.
This is our most complete record by far. A Hundred Million Suns sounds like the marriage of everything we learned from the Jeepster years and the Fiction years made into something new and bolder. Our spikiness and our indie-ness are coming through again with all the poppiness of the last two records. There's a lot of melody here and you can't cloak that whatever you do with it. This album is touched by our entire history, and hopefully sounds like our future too.
Before anything, I wanted to be a rapper. I used to make beats and I would start singing to layer my beats and that's kind of how I realized I could sing.
A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.
A few years ago, I had an interest in making things that felt more like "pieces." That was when I was making a lot of stuff that you could call beats, and it dawned on me that I could say much more nuanced, precise things if I tried to make them more composed. It sounds a bit corny, but I do love the idea that something can make you forget that you're listening and just transport you to somewhere else in your head.
My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.
If our most highly qualified General Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organization for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid that that which we have at present.
Let me just say you could end this violence within a very short period of time, have a complete ceasefire - which Iran could control, which Russia could control, which Syria could control, and which we and our coalition friends could control - if one man would merely make it known to the world that he doesn't have to be part of the long-term future; he'll help manage Syria out of this mess and then go off into the sunset, as most people do after a period of public life. If he were to do that, then you could stop the violence and quickly move to management.
Sometimes I go in and try to write beats, but I just trash 'em, and then the next time I go in, I'll make like six beats - six legit, nice beats. I'm really particular with how it needs to sound.
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