Robert Hilburn Quotes

It's hard to be in the limelight and write songs that cater to fans that have expectations of you. We just want to write songs that we love, but all the different people with different ideas coming in make it difficult. We have to ask ourselves if we're writing for the most important people: the fans.

The joy of songwriting only gets messed up if you are trying to follow up a big success, or you are trying to create a hit single, or if you have conscious thoughts of a particular outcome for the music.

I don't understand why people make me want to make music that's a join-the-dots thing by numbers. I find it really difficult when people say, 'Aw, you should have made a really big hip hop record, that would have been really good for you' or, 'You should have made a song like Lily Allen, that would have been so great.'

I do feel pressure from the outside world a little bit just because everybody wants new music, which is really nice. It just proves that everybody likes what I'm doing. But at the same time, I feel like it's important to just chill and experience things and really make the songs true to me.

Honestly, I really can't speak on others, but in a sense, I feel like every artist always has their problems with the industry because we all want to have our creative way.

I don't have the psychological stamina to last under artistic compromises over a prolonged period of time. I get hostile and vindictive. It wears me down.

When you make a lot of money for a record company, they don't want you to evolve. Growing older, you naturally do.

I was told when I was little I couldn't have an opinion because you want everyone to buy your record and like you.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

Music has become a bigger business, and with that there is more pressure to succeed; I think that it creates a negative pressure for being creative.

I like Modest Mouse. I'm our biggest fan. And enemy. I won't waste people's time by putting out a Modest Mouse record just because. That's fair, right?

I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.

With Lady Antebellum, there's always pressure. It's hard for commerce not to rear its ugly head when you're making decisions.

I love hip hop, and I have a bunch of urban songs I write for fun that I can't put on my albums because people would laugh and point.

It's hard when people are expecting things from you, and all you're trying to do is write songs that you like for yourself.

It's difficult as an artist sometimes. There's a lot of pressure when it's your first album. You want to make something that's meaningful and timeless, not something that's trendy.

I was in school for four years writing music to please my teachers. That was not music I liked. And when I make music that isn't for something I want to make, and it's to please other people, it's - the outcome is really bad.

I don't want to just make music as I want to be legendary. I understand it has to be commercial as I have to feed my family. I am in between these two marks and they are not many people in this space. I want my work to my valued even if my face is forgotten.

Art should be able to be innovative without compromising itself. That's why I believe artists should have bigger preoccupations than checking the price tags on their work or becoming curators' darlings.

I thought 'Gutterflower' was a really good record, but the album before that got so big that everyone expected us to go through that again.

I feel like there's a lot of pressure on artists to be 100-percent organic all the time.

I'm not trying to chase a radio hit, but at a certain time, you can't make the same album over and over.

I don't want to do music in a box, like everybody say what I can't do, 'he can't say this.'

When you're working in service to a big project, there's always the question of, 'Is there total freedom to do what I think is right artistically, or is this a job?' It's okay for things to be a job. I'm perfectly comfortable working. I don't need to sit around and quench whatever personal artistic thirst I have at all times.

I feel like traditional artists feel like everything that they do has to be perfect and touched up, and it has to be about something that would be able to be played on the radio.