There is still some art in pop music. But it can’t happen if you’re not inspired.
BEN FOLDSI’m definitely an anomaly, but I’m making things. They’re selling, say, martinis, and I’m kind of making vintage Riesling.
More Ben Folds Quotes
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The press is like any business. Its a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster.
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If I’m in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don’t need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.
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The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.
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I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you.
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It’s a tough thing to know that when you’re making your album, you’re going to end up collaborating with, say, Wal-Mart, on your artwork. That just sucks. And the pressure behind getting the numbers real fast is, to me, dizzying.
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You can’t really control how people hear stuff. It’s hard to remember that. I have to let go of it.
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If you can’t draw a crowd, draw dicks on the wall
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The nature of honesty is that if someone has information or knows something about you that you don’t want heard, then they have power over you.
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If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I’m sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don’t do that, I’ve hamstrung the melody.
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I used to do this big rant at the end of some gigs with Ben Folds Five. The band broke into this big heavy metal thing and I started as a joke to scream in a heavy metal falsetto. I found myself saying things like: Feel my pain, I am white, feel my pain.
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Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible – it wasn’t an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.
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White people don’t sing together very often, and when they do, it’s about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.
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I think alcohol is a good drug for me when I’m writing. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with it. I can stop for a few weeks, so I think it’s okay. I don’t think it’s good for my liver, but I do love it. It’s a huge part of my life, and it makes me happy.
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People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini.
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I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest so I can be for you what you want to see.
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I don’t leave my neighborhood. I don’t go anywhere. There are four blocks I live in and there are two coffee shops, one at each end of the block… so I don’t do much driving…
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In many ways, I’ve chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don’t like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.
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The music business is a weird business. Sometimes licensing doesn’t happen because some business component that you never knew about stops it.
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I’m older than I was, and I’m still washed-up, and I haven’t changed my music one iota. It’s just much easier to do this when people are being nice to you.
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Some people would say they never see me because I don’t go anywhere. I stay in the blue state of Nashville, in my bubble.
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If you’re afraid they might discover your redneck past, there are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past.
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I look to an out gay man or woman as pretty much what I would aspire to. The strength that it takes to do that and the floodgates that open and what they pay for it.
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I do think that when you make repeated mistakes, it’s usually because you’re just not coming to grips with something.
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Next door, there’s an old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep. And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days and passed away. I’m sorry, I know that’s a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.
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Everyone, when you’re a teenager and you’re growing up, you do feel like your life is dramatic enough to be on a TV screen, but we know that it’s not.
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Even though I live in America more, I feel like when I go to Adelaide, that’s when I get to go home.
BEN FOLDS