Phil Elverum Quotes

I've never really felt comfortable co-writing. I usually go at my own speed, you know.

I don't want to sound like Ross; I don't want to sound like Puff. I want to make my own music: French Montana.

Music is such an intensely personal thing for me, and I knew if I was going to do it, it would be in my own way.

I'm not interested so much in collaboration. You see that from the history of my albums.

The way I look at a solo project is, I create what I want with whoever I want.

I make the kind of music I like.

A lot of my branding has come from stubbornness - I knew what I liked. I knew what I wanted to do.

When I'm making a song that's very Grimes, it just feels very insular and it feels weird to have someone else do something on it.

I have to be my own artist. I need the world to know who I am, especially for music. When it comes to acting, that is a whole other story. I have no complaints; that's a team effort. It's not just me, it's everyone. But when it comes to music, it is solo; that's all me.

I could make a whole album with no one else involved at all. It would be a total, unadulterated expression of myself. Because whenever you have others playing on a project, their influence becomes a part of it.

My films, no one else will do.

If everybody wanted to follow the left side of the pallet like I had on 'Tusk,' there would have been no need for me to do solo work.

Making your own records is really satisfying in the sense that you more or less get to do what you want. It may not sell or whatever, but on an artistic level, the only people that you really have to fight with are the people in your own band.

I want to stay away from trends and do what we want to do musically.

Solo, you don't have compromise. It gets back to what's great when you're a musician.

I'm very involved in the production of my songs. I know what I like and what I don't like.

When we auditioned for 'The X Factor,' we were five individuals going into the show. That obviously means we are five solo artists in our beings, so we have our own creative ideas, of what sounds the best music-wise, because we are all artists.

Some people don't understand that I - as an artist and a person - I want to make my own decisions and create the music that I personally like.

My music is not like everybody gonna love it, it's really what I make of it.

You're the artist - you make the music that you want to make.

The point of fashion is that you take the picture you want. And fashion is the only photography that allows fantasy, and I'm a fantasist.

For me, I work very self-contained. It's literally just me sitting in a room doing it until the very end of the process when other musicians come in and instruments are recorded.

Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)

There are obviously so many artists that are very inspiring, but I can't say that they like - that I have someone in mind that is like a creative direction of where I want to go as an artist. I think I'm just doing my own thing.

You have to be able to give the people what you want in your way. And that's how you, to me, become a person that they love and not just a fly-by night actor.