Agnes Obel Quotes

For me, growing-up music was always about telling stories.

It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

It's hard to remember my childhood without remembering music.

My music comes from my personal background.

As a musician, it's only natural that my music mirrors my life.

My earliest memories have to do with music.

I make a playlist for every character I portray. Music plays a huge part in helping me understand a character. Every time I get a new role, I will take a chunk of time to just sit and listen to a bunch of songs and select the ones that make sense in my mind for that character. I can't even explain how much it helps me.

I've always made music that was representative of real life.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

I always write my music based on what is going on in my life at the time.

I wanted to make the soundtrack of people's lives.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

I still connect with original emotions. 'Night Moves' was written about 1961 or 1962 when I was in high school, and it was about what my friends and I did in that period.

Music evokes so many feelings in us, memories, nostalgia, things that are connected to our past.

My father had a passion for love. It's mostly what he talked about in his songs, and I still have his old records today.

Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

I'm interested in music as an extension of character.

I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It's more a sensory memory.

What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.

The music that was popular in your youth seems to be the music you recall most vividly - and most nostalgically - for the rest of your life. But so is the music that was popular in your parents' youth.

I never really thought about my music being universal. When I set out to write, it was just a feeling that felt good to me. I never thought about being able to reach everybody.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.