Lou Barlow Quotes

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.

I feel so much more comfortable when I'm working on material which makes other people scratch their heads and ask, 'You're going to make a musical out of that?'

It's an album that is a little bit different and probably isn't easy to get out. It's not likely that a major label would have picked it up and said that they had a smash hit record.

The more far-out artists, the better.

So many actors and musicians seem to be only interested in what's expected of them, and they join the dots accordingly. I don't fit into any narrow categories as an actor or a singer.

I know that whatever I put out, whether people think it's pop or noise or whatever, it's always going to be some kind of a freak or mutation. It's not going to be anything pure that a lot of people will relate to. And that's fine.

The next album I make might be the most messed up thing ever. It's all momentary for me.

Be non-trend-driven, and explore, be creative and take risks as an artist and as a cultural communicator.

I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

We're more into expressing ourselves than making radio hits.

I wasn't really writing with anything commercial in mind I just wanted to create some new music.

Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.

I love playing instruments that I don't know how to play or am not familiar with. I like the idea of danger and innocence that comes from it. As an artist, I feel I should be able to do something with anything I get my hands on. The music becomes minimalist because of my limited knowledge.

I think I might like to try film again just as an experiment, but I know that I could never do the mainstream thing again.

For me, I always have looked at 'indie' as a term of 'independence.' Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant 'popular' to me; you know, it didn't define a sound.

Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.

I think that Zappa intentionally made his music weird, but did it with intelligence.

The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there is no taste. There's anarchy of taste, which seems good to me.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

As artists, we have the luxury of experimenting with extra crazy things, but I feel like my aesthetic is very street-style and high-low.

I'm the haphazard engineer of my own music.

I don't know what's in store for me, but I know that I want to create work, and I want to create an environment where I can bring in my favorite people and collaborate with them, and do something that is so much weirder and so different from what you'd see in commercial film.

When I heard Flying Lotus, I was like, 'Wow, okay, everything can be off the grid.'

I admire artists who really take risks and aren't afraid to do smaller movies and obscure, abstract things. It would be really cool if my career neared that.