A Quote by Sophia Amoruso

My days of being the tardy employee at the record store gave me a cultural and musical understanding that was more unique than if I'd just listened to garbage-y pop on the radio my entire life.
After my second No. 1, my record company, Warner Brothers, gave me a beautiful present - quite unique at the time - one of the very first Sony stereos which had speaker and radio included so I could record the radio and build up cassette tapes of music, gospel singing, adverts, evangelists.
I don't think my record collection or musical knowledge is vast. I just listen to the radio all the time - I'm a pop music enthusiast.
I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?
The mindset of chasing that next #1 record doesn't exist for me anymore. It's more about being a well-rounded entertainer than being a pop artist. Obviously, it would be wonderful to have a hit record but I don't base my happiness on that anymore. It's about the accomplishment of a project that satisfies me. I just want to enjoy the ride.
If there is a good musical reason, I think it might draw more attention and sell, though it is not guaranteed. To make a record without a musical reason, you have to either be a pop star who sells automatically or just be lucky.
I'm very easily influenced, and I'm also a quick study, so I think when I decided I wanted to write pop songs, I literally just listened to pop radio for six months to get a feel for it and understand it.
My first record I ever got was 'Full Moon Fever.' My dad gave me a copy when I was maybe nine years old or something. And I listened to the heck out of that record. I loved that record.
Avant-garde, jazz, pop, classical, country and western, rock, free, straight-ahead, etc. are ultimately meaningless terms in the face of the music being discussed at best - at worst, those terms often serve as code words for what is in fact a cultural / political discussion more than a musical one.
I couldn't afford to go to the record store to buy new tapes, so I'd tape everything off the radio. Just hit record when my song came on. I used to take my mom's tapes and tape over them. I had a nice little collection. Had my own Stephen Jackson mixtapes off the radio!
Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radio/record player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing.
There were a lot of things I listened to, but so-called pop music never killed me, you know, the type of stuff that always seems to make it on the radio. The whole radio thing seems so... it's like they've accepted the whole "new wave" thing only because this kind of pop element came into it. In Europe they really love emotion, but here it's like, "let's stay away from it because we might cry or something".
People tend to forget that we tie our life history to music like the soundtrack to your life in many more ways than just having a hit record on the radio.
Growing up, I didn't come from a musical family. Neither of my parents played an instrument, sang out loud, or listened to the radio with frequency. The record collection in the living room was only about 2 feet long - and that included 4 solid inches of Neil Diamond and Herb Alpert.
I listened to a battery radio, old country and pop stuff. Because I was singing all the time, my dad bought me a $7.50 guitar.
I always just wanted to have the wherewithal to make another record. I never really dreamt of fortune or fame, because it seemed so unlikely. I'm much more interested in people's perceptions of me than what my life is really like. It appears that some people think it's all cocaine and caviar for Okkervil River. And it's not. I'm making a little bit more than I was making at the video store right now.
Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world. And that just gave me a chance to see how life could be. And it gave me a chance to interact with everybody, not just black people or Mexicans. It made me just a little more worldly.
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