Stephin Merritt Quotes

Quotes about:

• I don't think there are any clichés I try to avoid. As soon as I spot a cliché, I go for it. I feel like clichés are the most useful thing in songwriting. They're the tool on which you build all the rest of the song.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are only so many instruments you can layer on top of each other that aren't perfectly electronically programmed. "Long Vermont Roads" just cannot be performed live, because it's just too cluttered if it's played by humans. Synthesizers stay out of each other's way in a way that hand-played instruments never can.

  Stephin Merritt

  Long

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Never try to do anything artistic when you're feeling something overwhelming. It's like driving a car: If you're experiencing road rage, pull over.

  Stephin Merritt

  Car, Feelings, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• If you start out with a song sounding like Britney Spears, and you end up with a song sounding like Pauline Oliveros, you'd better have pretty good liner notes explaining what on earth you mean.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Mean, Earth

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.

  Stephin Merritt

  Block, Musical, Music Is

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• I write songs by sitting around in bars, so drinking songs are a little obvious. It's surprising that I don't write entirely drinking songs, since I am, in fact, drinking while writing the song. Drinking and love are the two principal sources of pleasure outside of music. There's only so many sources of pleasure, really. That's about it. Well, there are other arts as well. But none of them are as pleasurable as music, on a physical level.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Art, Drinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• The adventure is when people don't know what they're doing at all. Like, I think that the first pop band to use synthesizers as their main instrument and take it seriously was probably Silver Apples. And they sure didn't know what they were doing, and they sure don't sound like anything else.

  Stephin Merritt

  Adventure, Thinking, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Well, there are certainly original things to say. But I'm not sure that a pop song is the appropriate format to say them in.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Not Sure, Pop Song

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• If the songs were in lumps, then you would expect to understand what was going on in the plot. Which is not a realistic goal. And also the instrumentation is different for every show, so it's more varied sonically. And people are free to make up their own plots, of course. There are pretty dense and complicated plots, and they're simple songs.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Simple, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

  Stephin Merritt

  Thinking, Serious

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• You know, most love songs are not cheesy and corny. Most love songs are complaints, I think. Or about unrequited love, coming at it from some oblique angle. Only the ones that say "I love you" over and over are the cheesy, corny ones that people complain about

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Love You, Unrequited Love

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.

  Stephin Merritt

  Technology, Kind, Melancholy

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

  Stephin Merritt

  Chinese, Rhyme, Impression

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Serious music isn't listened to in a casual setting. You don't want to listen to that in headphones on the subway.

  Stephin Merritt

  Serious, Music Is

  Source: pitchfork.com

  7 Copy quote

• I gave up music criticism because of the increasingly obvious conflict of interest. I couldn't say anything bad about the records when I might be meeting that person's manager backstage an hour later.

  Stephin Merritt

  Criticism, Say Anything, Records

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  5 Copy quote

• My mother was into folk-rock when I was little, so I think of folk-rock as the norm from which everything else deviates. Of course, that's completely preposterous, but that's how I grew up. What is the norm by which to judge wordiness? I think I'm less wordy than Madonna.

  Stephin Merritt

  Mother, Thinking, Judging

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Well, hardcore is so much about the body, in that you have to play as fast as possible. I'm not sure it can be ironized. You can't play faster, though I suppose that with the help of electronics you could play faster. Yeah, if you sped it up, that could ironize it.

  Stephin Merritt

  Helping, Hardcore, Not Sure

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Well, things hold up even if they sound dated. It can be very difficult to listen to 80s pop songs with really, really gigantic smashed drum sounds. You just want to turn that gated reverb down on the snare. It sounds wrong now. It sounds amateurish. And ugly. But at the time it sounded state-of-the-art. So yeah, I think it's important not to sound state-of-the-art in a way that anybody else is going to sound. Or you'll quickly sound like yesterday's state-of-the-art.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Thinking, Important

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• Okay, a truly great song is a song that makes its own aesthetic intentions clear and then lives up to them and exceeds them in an interesting way. Alright?

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Interesting, Intention

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's already a great deal to do writing the songs. And if I were completely in control of it, nobody would be able to say "this song doesn't work."

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Writing

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• I actually prefer to hear small groups of instruments. Orchestras seem to lack a texture for me, or variety of texture. There's only about ten things you can do with one note in a string section. But a lone violin is continuously changing textures.

  Stephin Merritt

  Lone, Variety

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

• I don't remember things initially when listening to music. Like, I don't remember where I first heard a song, I don't have nostalgic attachment to a song in that it reminds me of such and such a time or place. I think I probably did experience that somewhat when I was not a full-time, professional musician, but I don't think music works that way for people who are in it constantly.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Thinking, Attachment

  4 Copy quote

• Surf is that music which is entirely about evoking something. There's never any vocals, so it's not about the lyrics, it's about the reverb.

  Stephin Merritt

  Surf, Vocal

  4 Copy quote

• If you want to write a love song, you need to not try to write it for a particular person in a particular situation. It needs to be vague, otherwise you're going to fall into trap after trap of trying to rhyme with somebody's name. Keep it vague.

  Stephin Merritt

  Song, Fall, Writing

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are so many clichés in the world, especially in music, that it's a never-ending creative font to just bring two of them together and let them interact.

  Stephin Merritt

  Creative, Together, World

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

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