Adrian Younge Quotes

I play music the way it was played in yesteryear.

I'm a little bit out of it, I suppose; I'm more of the golden oldie type.

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

I don't use old music.

You used to have to sing and convey emotion, and now, well, technically you can do anything with technology. It sucks for music today, but that's why that old music feels so good to me.

Now that the 90's are over and more time has gone by, the 80's sound fresh again.

It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the '60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren't trying to recreate music from the '20s. Why do it?

I listen to old music, man.

A lot of people say 'Boo'd Up' reminds them of '90s R&B. It has that feeling, which is why I think people take to the song so much.

I have been told that my voice is very suited to oldies albums.

The music that I write, I have to actually own it and live by it, which is cool. It's no problem.

I'm going to work with Dan Clowes. After Charlie Kaufman, it's hard to fill up the gap. It's hard to find somebody who... A lot of writers, I can clearly see the desire of succeeding before the desire of expressing themselves. Sometimes people get upset when you want to be different. You were talking about "whimsical," which is a nice word. But sometimes they use the word "quirky" in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I'm doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don't really care. They feel it's cynical. But I don't think I have any cynicism in me.

I paint what I see and not what others like to see.

No matter how far you go, if you can't go back to the essence, you're not sayin' nothin'. The essence for me is hip-hop. But the hip-hop community I came up in isn't a loyal community.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

If I was singing like somebody else, then it was almost like I was expressing myself like somebody else. So it was always a very original thing for me. It's my voice, it's my diary, it's the way I connect with people.

In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

I wanted people to know that I was making what I was making just on a sampler, basically.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

Usually it seems like either you sacrifice something and a lot of people will pay attention, or you stay true to yourself and appeal to a smaller group of people, but now we've managed to do what we felt was the right thing to do in our heart and had it reach a wide audience. It feels very rare.

Honest songs aren't written for money.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism