A Quote by Nick Murphy
This album is my life, and my life's really not that interesting. It's not "not interesting," but I'm just some dude just like everyone else. But by recording it in an album format, it becomes a product. That's the idea of Built on Glass; it's the relationship between my personal life and the music I make.
Related Quotes
The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn't see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.
I don't want to do a gimmick. It's a bummer that that's how it is. I would say, personally speaking, consuming music now is harder than it was before. It's like being stuck in a slot machine. There's just so much noise. It's just constant noise. It's harder to clear your head and give the time to music that a lot of it really deserves. It's really crazy how different your relationship to an album or music becomes, even if it's digital, if you spend the $7 to $10 on it. It forms this relationship where you're not just going to throw it away.
I realized I couldn't get bookings as a performing artist on the road, as it were, I could not make a living in music without going on the road, but I couldn't get booked without a new product. People say, "Where's your new album?" Well, I have no new album, and I'm not going to have a new album. They said, "What are you doing?" I'm performing music that I've done my entire life that I've never performed, and I'm promoting material that I haven't promoted.
I'm a person who's been in a long-term relationship. It's not surprising that a lot of my friends - whether they're in same-sex relationships or not, whether they're married officially or just in a long-term relationship - have really interesting and various stages in their relationship. My life is looking at these friendships and saying, "Wait a minute, isn't this something really interesting? How can I explore this?"
'Unbreakable Smile' was based off one of the songs I wrote for the album - it was actually the first song I wrote for the album without realizing it yet. I think I wanted to name the album that because it seemed like that was just the theme of that chapter in my life and just the theme of all the songs put together.
In a way, I think this album is stronger than the last one - in terms of not hiding behind anything. So in a way, I see this album as fiercer than the last. I just find it interesting hearing what people think. If that's people's interpretation, then that's valid and interesting. It's hard to try and neatly place a record like that.
I don't really marinate in anybody's album because I don't really want to sound like anybody else when I put my album out. So I'd rather not even be tempted to listen to a bunch of other stuff with any degree of emersion in it, cause I just don't want to sound like anything else, so I kinda focus on my own music.
An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.
Music and time have such an interesting relationship. Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life and it really is like you're still there. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.
So, in addition to being a full-time father of two and everything else in life, it isn't so much that I'm sitting around plotting an album. I just kinda follow my muse and wherever my interests lie, and at some point I decide, "Right. It's been a while, time to figure out how to get serious and make some music."
With this new album, I prepared for it a long time, and I was happy with the songs and the production. I felt that I proved myself with the first album, and with this new album, I just want to share some of my music. And that was always my feeling and my intention.
The 'Black Album' was my real first introduction to Metallica. I was, like, 12 or 13 at the time. We were just getting into music, and I liked that album a lot, but it didn't necessarily change my life. But when I started picking up all the other Metallica records, 'Master of Puppets' was the one to me that stuck out with its songwriting.
I like just having that separation between my music life and my personal life.
I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art.
All the songs that were written for that album are just all our first sophomore songs. So they're all from real life. Very sweet and very innocent. I think the theme of the album probably was just that it was our first record. ... Back when we were first making records, you didn't just make the music, you put a great deal of energy into the way it looked, and every word that was written on the whole thing.
When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
