Latest Bradford Cox Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• You gotta have friends, and it's really hard to have friends that don't operate on the same schedule as you or do the same kind of things you do, because they don't understand it. And then you realize that your friends - your real-life friends - it's not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you're doing than how you're doing.

  Bradford Cox

  Kind, Realizing

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I want to build an audience that's willing to follow us in whichever direction we might choose.

  Bradford Cox

  Audience

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I realized I had written maybe, I dunno, the first ever asexual love song. Where it's really just about a fear of dying alone - you need contact, you need love, you need empathy. You need this relationship but if there's no sex involved, people act like it's not a legitimate relationship.

  Bradford Cox

  Song, Love You, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Contrary to popular belief, maybe, I'm a really friendly guy, I guess, and I really like meeting people. And I'm not really super impressed even if you're my hero; I can just rap with you and we can hang. I'm not gonna like sit there and bite my lip and ask questions about certain songs - okay I might do that once or twice. But it's just, like, two people hanging out.

  Bradford Cox

  Song, Rap, Hero

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music. And it's not a namedropping thing, but there's just not that many people in this certain small little genre world we live in that I don't know or am not acquainted with. And I like them all; I get along with pretty much everyone. It wouldn't be unusual to see a thousand collaborations at some point.

  Bradford Cox

  People, Collaboration, World

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I'm not the guy in the dress with the blood and the unrequited gay whatever - which, according to my psychiatrist, my gayness is a form of narcissism but you'll have to ask him about that.

  Bradford Cox

  Gay, Guy, Narcissism

  Source: pitchfork.com

• What could be more experimental than me writing a straight up love song?

  Bradford Cox

  Song, Writing, Straight Up

  Source: pitchfork.com

• A song like "Walkabout", it's totally imitative. The goal of that song was to make people happy, and I've never really made a song to make people happy before. I really genuinely wanted people to listen to that song and have their spirits lifted.

  Bradford Cox

  Song, People, Goal

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I think the younger kids need to realize there's this whole forgotten 90s that people don't really talk about.

  Bradford Cox

  Kids, Thinking, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn't really want attention.

  Bradford Cox

  Eye, People, Attention

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I'll be honest with you, one of the things that frustrated me the most out the record leak thing, it had nothing to do with record sales - I mean, that's a joke. Has anybody looked at how many records anybody sells anymore? If you're not Jay-Z, a record leaking isn't going to affect you. It was just really personal.

  Bradford Cox

  Mean, Frustrated, Honest

  Source: pitchfork.com

• You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

  Bradford Cox

  Trying, Musician, Kind

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I was trying to write a song based on a story in a random book of Puerto Rican short stories that I found in a thrift store. I thought it was really dark, and so I tried to interpret it. I've always been interested in writing from other people's perspectives and other gender perspectives.

  Bradford Cox

  Song, Book, Writing

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I don't like the sound of my own voice. And, for people I don't know, their impression of me is what they read on the internet, and they're so far off a lot of the time. I think people are intimidated by me, and I don't know why. Sometimes even my own bandmates can be intimidated, or irritated, by me. I come across as arrogant somehow. In reality, I've probably got the lowest self-esteem of anybody I know, which has really been rubbed in my face lately in personal situations.

  Bradford Cox

  Reality, Thinking, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

• All music is devotional, whether it's devotion to products, face washes, creams, plastic. Everybody is devoted to something.

  Bradford Cox

  Devotion, Devotional, Music Is

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I collaborate a little bit with different aspects of my own mind. I kick my own ass instead of kicking other people's asses.

  Bradford Cox

  Mind, Different, Ass

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• We didn't have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you're young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.

  Bradford Cox

  Path, Twins, Desperate

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I like playing at public schools. I like when there's more of a diverse audience. I'll play wherever people want to hear my music, and I'll be glad and grateful for the opportunity, but I'd rather not play for a bunch of white privileged kids. I'm not meaning that in a disrespectful way; you go where people want to hear your music. So if that's where people want to hear me play, I'm glad to play for them. But I'd rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.

  Bradford Cox

  Grateful, School, Kids

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think teenagers just don't have the persistence to pretend to like something they don't anymore. I used to do that - make myself like stuff that didn't immediately appeal to me. When you're 17 and checking out John Cage records from the library. It's not like it's got the hooks of a Ramones record, or a Beach Boys record. But at the same time, you're like, I know there's something in here that I'm supposed to understand. And then eventually you find it.

  Bradford Cox

  Beach, Teenager, Boys

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The first thing I think I ever played in public, aside from singing in church, would have been - and this is a true story - when I was about nine or 10 years old, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. I played the theme from Twin Peaks on a little tiny Casio keyboard. People politely applauded. I just fell in love with that song and thought it was very heartbreaking.

  Bradford Cox

  Song, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• When I do a record, it sounds more punk and raw. Or it will sound louder, or it will sound more shocking. Or mind-boggling. I'll be trying to figure it out, but once I've got it figured out I'll be like, I know this; I know where this came from. I think art is most interesting when the intention is not clear.

  Bradford Cox

  Art, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Usually I'm not really conscious of what's going on. I don't have a lot of memories onstage. At all.

  Bradford Cox

  Memories, Conscious

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• A lot of Appalachian music has a certain haunted, foggy feel to it; a certain sinister quality. And that transcends who is singing it. I think it's good if an artist can represent some kind of culture that they either aspire to ignite, or that they themselves experience.

  Bradford Cox

  Thinking, Artist, Singing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm real critical of myself. I think a lot of what I've done is boring indie rock. I didn't intend it to be that way, but somehow milk gets added to everything.

  Bradford Cox

  Real, Thinking, Done

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.

  Bradford Cox

  School, Interesting, Library

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com