A Quote by Elena Tonra

I find it interesting when I look back at songs and it's what I've been thinking and feeling for the past two years. There's some sexual stuff in this record and I'm sometimes like, "Is that too far?" There's a confidence in it. It's over-sharing, but in a really therapeutic way.
There are producers that have been my friends for many years that I'm still a big fan of, from Boyz Noize to solo acts. Justice. It really varies. All the way to like...sometimes I'll just find some dude out of Chicago that makes a great house song. I'm feeling a lot of the deep house stuff, Jamie Jones.
I had basically been shelved by the record label for two years and I was writing songs every day. I made two albums that just never came out, and that was just a really big knock to my confidence, because everything I sent seemed like it just wasn't good enough.
The Replacements are the foundation for a lot of what came after in alternative and college rock. Let It Be is their best record and has the most diverse collection of songs. Some pop stuff, some heavy stuff, and some real moments of beauty like 'Sixteen Blue' and 'Androgynous.' It's a record I always go back to.
Every record has been very different, so I can't really compare them. The first record was good. I originally recorded about half the songs on that one in 2003 or something, and then I went back a few years later and re-recorded them and added some other songs.
I mean the reason that I started writing close to home, "Santa Fe," et cetera, was a kind of looking back on past events. I don't know, it's just some of the dark spaces I've been. And it feels like with a music career and whatnot, I've been able to crawl out of those places. So it's interesting to look back on them and try to hold on to the feeling of what you went through.
I would say it's always been in me to want to have victorious songs. I sort of want my songs to have a feeling of victory, but through a lot of pain. Like, you're 75 percent to the top of the mountain and sometimes you fall back to the bottom, but hopefully by the end of the record you'll feel like there's no mountain at all.
Maybe in writing about and through trauma it was therapeutic in a way, but it didn't feel like it at the time. I was in a very dark place, in lots of foreign cities, far from New York. A lot of personal trials and tribulations took over my life in those years. It might be some time before I see what therapeutic function this book did serve. But for now, it's not even easy to read from it.
Oh, I shop all over the place, really. Like I love department stores like Barney's and Saks and stuff like that. But I also just like to walk in Soho and find some interesting boutique that doesn't really have a huge name or following, and I'll go in and find something amazing.
I go back to things all the time. It's really nice, too, like when I'm going through some kind of a writer's block, and I'm feeling uninspired, I go to some of my oldest songs from over the years and sift through them, and one thing that's very nice is to see how I've grown up a little bit. A little bit.
I have some stuff that I've been working on the past year or two, but I haven't put anything together into songs or anything like that. Maybe it'll turn into letters to the president, I don't really know what it'll turn into.
I'm not thinking about the next record really yet. I kind of want to do a bunch of stuff with Jonathan Zawada, the guy who did the album art. I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record.
Whenever I approach a record, I don't really have a science to it. I approach every record differently. First record was in a home studio. Second record was a live record. Third record was made while I was on tour. Fourth record was made over the course of, like, two years in David Kahn's basement.
Actually, my experience over the past couple of years hasn't necessarily been something that would be interesting, were it committed to record.
I never look back and think too much about my films. I've done some work I've been proud of over the years but which of them is my favourite I really don't know. I could say the last one. I've had little jumps in my career like Unforgiven possibly.
I suppose some people find their voice later than others, but it's interesting to look back at really early work to see that there's some kernel or a Rosetta Stone, in a way.
A career is measured over the course of the years, not moments. Over good decisions, over successes, not moments, failures, missteps, or bad comments. I learned that I needed to take a step back and look at my career not in that one moment that made me feel really bad, but what I had done not even in the past one or two years or last one or two hires, but that that career is built over many, many, many, many successive quarters and years and good decisions - never, ever made in that one moment where you felt really bad.
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