A Quote by Dan Smith

I think basically, there are some bands and acts who feel the need to cultivate a persona or act a certain way or get quotes or whatever, because they feel like that helps them get promotion, and I feel like we're a band who have always just made music that we love and kept ourselves to ourselves and got on with it.
But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.
We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.
I long for the day when we can all be ourselves, whoever we are, and express ourselves in whatever way we like, and we don't have these kinds of funny constraints in our heads that make us feel 'Ooh, there's a different power relationship because that's a man and that's a woman'. And we still get that. It's not helpful.
The fact that I'm a fifth of Punch Brothers... that's lucky for me because I feel like I get to operate in the context of one of the great string bands. There's just not another string band I would rather be in, and i'm just compelled to make music for and with string bands. It's what I know, and it's kind of like who I am.
I do question a band's longevity, because most of my favorite bands only made one or two good albums. After that, I didn't care about them anymore. Sometimes I wonder if people feel the same thing about us. The way I look at it is, if we can continue to inspire ourselves and write really beautiful music that we're proud of, I don't think there's any intention to stop.
If a fan approaches me and I feel like they have some kind of agenda, I'm probably gonna get real closed-off and not talk to them. But if I feel a connection with someone, or if I feel a certain trust with somebody, I feel like, 'You know what, I can open up to this person and tell them about an experience.'
I think that there's a singular emotion that goes along with what the bands that we love mean to us. I feel like people feel represented by that in a way that you don't get from saying, 'Oh, I like this book' or 'I went to college here' or 'This is what my job is.'
Maybe it's easier to have that desire guest-spot-packed album, for example, you're a rapper and you need someone to sing the hook. I guess for us, it just kind of feels like we want to explore ourselves more. That sounds kind of cheesy, but I don't know. I have a lot of artists whose music I have this perfect relationship with, and I don't really feel like I need to meet them or get to know them or write with them because of it.
Personally, the message that I would like to convey to everyone is just that life is really great and you can do whatever you want with it. That's what I feel like I've gotten out of my experience with the band, because I have done so many amazing things that I never thought I would get to do-and I don't really feel like I'm any more qualified than the next person. I feel like people should take their goals seriously and do exactly what they want, because they can.
I understand there are inevitable things that we have to go through: heartbreak, family problems. I don't feel like some Quixotic idiot who says, 'We don't have to feel pain.' No! Let's feel it, let's make it work for ourselves. But I want us all to be able to get past it.
Some cultures don't have a separate word for music and dance. To my knowledge, this notion of listening to music without dancing is a Western creation. I can't think of any artist that I love that doesn't inspire movement in some form or another. I guess Tangerine Dream or early Vangelis or something like that, you're not really going to dance. But on the whole, I feel like dancing and music are so naturally intertwined. I feel like subconsciously, that's the goal whenever I'm working on music. It's kind of the defining thing: Does it got some funk to it, basically?
I don't feel like I need to preach to the world or nothing like that. I just feel like I share what I say, and if listeners get it, they get it. And I never underestimate the audience's ability to feel me.
I love hip-hop. I'm big into Jay-Z, Kanye, Little Wayne. Those are everyone's favorites, I know. I just like the fact that when they get on track and talk about whatever they're talking about, they have supreme confidence. That's pretty much what you need to have on the field. I like the way they approach their music, they feel like no one can touch them.
When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
When we focus mostly on our immediate needs, wants, and desires, we may achieve some of them but hardly feel satisfied. When we feel connected to ourselves on a deeper level, we get happy. We feel safe.
I'm just a music fan. I like pretty much all types of music, and I feel like I can get something out of everything. It just makes work a lot more fun whenever you're working on different things all the times and usually once I work with a band I usually will want to work with them again, just because we become good friends. That sometimes is the only bad thing, is that I work with bands that I already know. That's not really the best thing in the world because I should always be keeping my eyes out on other things.
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