Jamie xx Quotes

One of the things with the second record, a word I held close to my chest was 'brave.' To take chances to go outside the box and explore. To continue to toss off any expectation that our fans or anyone else might have of us, to just tap into who I am as a writer and artist and really just operate within that freedom of creation.

I like to make the music that I really love. You're supposed to make your favorite music that no one else played, and I'd like to just keep it at that and not really change it at all.

I found it liberating of necessity to devise my own style and my own tactics and to look for a voice on the instrument because there weren't really any that impacted strongly on me.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

I feel like I'm just trying to pave my own lane and just kind of make my own sound.

That's the thing about creating. When you create, you create your own thing, whatever that is. It's always going to seep through in whatever you do.

I can only do music if I can do it the way I can do it.

I can run the gamut with beats that no one else would think of. I'm not a trained musician, so I focus on what feels right before I dispatch to writing.

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.

All our forms are unique - movies, music and literature - and you have to leave the person who is doing it to do their best.

In my music, I'm never going to force anything to try to recreate a moment or something.

I always make a point to make my records different. Let's say I have a record that's influenced by hip-hop in an abstract way; for the next record, I'd try not to do that. They are all connected in a personal way but it's important not to repeat myself, because then I can always learn something about myself through my work.

Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.

Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.

Everything I do with BLK DNM is more personal than anything I have done before. I've worked hard to go deeper in my true intuition, and therefore I am definitely more pure in my personal taste than ever.

I am an artist who's just tryin' to do something different, and basically not caring about everybody's opinions and wanting to follow what everybody else is doing. At the same time, I know when to be serious, but I know when to joke.

U2's best work has always been when we didn't know what we're doing.

People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

I learned to embrace my individuality, and if that meant writing a song on one chord over and over again, then that's what I do.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.