A Quote by Sufjan Stevens

I'm from the generation that's always been recording, from the very beginning. I learned to play the guitar on the four-track. I started listening to music at a time when people were doing recording at home, when the discussion about songwriting correlated to the discussion about producing and engineering. I think that's a description of my generation.
When I was about 15 I had already been recording on my four track in my room, but I couldn't find anyone in my town to be in a band with me. I was in a band very briefly with a bunch of guys and they kicked me out because they wanted to play grindcore. I think they didn't think I could tread hard enough or something. So I started playing solo.
Nowadays, it's like two different arenas, recording and touring. When I started way back in the day, doing both was nothing, you didn't have to think about it, the road and recording.
When I first started recording music, I was actually singing about microphones, equipment, recording.
I think you can't have this discussion and you can't have a discussion about feminism and the consciousness of the world without having a discussion about what has happened to men lately. They're holding the other side of the bag.
I started a recording studio. I started producing people and doing remixes.
After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.
I was in Australia in about 1996 when I played some acoustic guitar for some guys at a studio down there. They were pretty happy with it, and mentioned doing an album, so about a year later I met some people who were interested in recording.
If you look at the first generation of wireless, it really lasted about 15 years before we went to the second generation. When we implemented the fourth generation, which allowed us to do all the smartphones and the videos, the time between that and going to the fifth generation is going to be four years.
When digital recording came in about '84, everything started to follow into digital. Now, you've got the best recording media in the world, but it's not very pleasing to the ear.
It's difficult, the synergy between Drake and our generation - my generation, anyway - in the sense that his music is vulnerable, he's very open, and you can connect to it. Like 'Started From The Bottom,' for instance. Not many people would have thought about that, even though it is a simple song.
Everything has changed since I started recording in 1972. But the very things that have opened this industry, like the digital platforms to reach more people, have also killed things that were happening before in the recording studio. Now, most of the time, there are no real musicians in the studio; it's people with sequencers and things.
I'm always writing my own music, recording my own music, even if I am 9/10 of the time recording stuff for other people. I'm still working on my own creative endeavors.
The problem with modern politics is everybody is doing sound bite stuff. In my stump speech, I give 20 minutes on why I think we're off track. And I think people do really want to engage in a serious high-level discussion on how to get the country back on track because people care about their own country.
What really changed my life was watching the movie Juice and the opening scene - just hearing that record rotate. When I heard that I started getting serious about DJing and making beats and recording myself on the four-track.
When I received the invitation to "check out" Fairport I knew absolutely nothing about them, all I knew was that they were beginning to establish themselves as an underground favorite, by playing regularly at the UFO club in Covent Garden. But the crowd I was running with at the time were listening to a completely different genre of music. So I had nothing to go on, there was nothing on vinyl, Fairport's recording days were still ahead of them.
I learned everything I knew about recording and engineering from my experience with Odd Future, so I was pretty comfortable with not having much.
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