Jamie xx Quotes

Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.

I realized you can be the dopest producer technically, but if the songs don't give you emotion, it doesn't matter.

It excites me when a person puts their whole self in a song or rhyme, or instrument. It fills me.

When creating an album, one of the first things you have to think about is what you want your production style to be.

Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

One of the most frustrating parts about songwriting for me is production, but it makes me want to get better at it and ends up being one of the most rewarding parts of it.

I don't concentrate on technical things like where a microphone is placed and things like that. As a producer, I try to keep the initial feeling from when I first heard a song and make sure we do what were initially aiming for.

Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.

I wanted to take the power of thought and the word, along with the power of speaking and heart, and see if we could wire what was coming out of us as humans with electric instruments.

I don't really care about audio quality. If people saw some of the ways that I record stuff, they'd see I don't care in that respect. I obviously care about things sounding good, but I think quality exists through other things like emotionally connecting with a lyric or a feeling, or whatever.

Inspiration is enough to give expression to the tone in singing, especially when the song is without words.

I listen to music to when I'm feeling a certain way or to make myself feel a certain way. So why not make my own music inspired by true emotions?

I've always wanted to sing. I don't think I have a great voice, but I just think that I get the emotion. It's very authentic. Whatever emotion I'm feeling, I can sing it, and you can feel it.

I just want people to feel what I feel when I hear music that I love.

When it comes to production and the overall sound, I don't really have a lot of intentions with it. I start off with melody and a lyrical idea, and then build off of that story.

The heart bleeds music no matter what, and it bleeds different types of music.

A guitar can be so human, so sorrowful, so angry, and I wanted to figure out how to achieve that vibe without having to actually use guitars, because 'Badlands' is a very futuristic record - and making it that in an era of futuristic music is a really hard thing to do!

With contemporary music, you automatically get connected. It connects you to the emotion of the characters.

I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head that I was trying to emulate on the keys. I wanted to do it for real. And it makes me look at the keys in a different way. So it's like I'm looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over top of it, you know.

Everything has a feeling to it, even if it's not your type of music - it has a feeling for somebody in the world.

Any musical output is emotional.

My production got better, songs, lyrics, everything; the sound, the quality, everything.

I tried for a long time to make DJ-able dance tracks that were more specific to the stuff that I was playing. Ultimately, I found I wasn't really capable of doing that. The only type of music I was able to make that really made me feel something would just come straight from my heart or straight from whatever emotions I was feeling at that time.