Ludwig Goransson Quotes

As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine.

My 'Slide Some Oil' ain't gon' be Nipsey Russell's 'Slide Some Oil.' Elijah Kelley's 'You Can't Win' ain't gon' be Michael Jackson's 'You Can't Win.'

Everyone has said I got my own sound.

The thing about doing mashups and covers is it's great, but a part of you never gets to really showcase what your original sound is like or what your writing voice is like.

I feel like I have to create the Keith Whitley sound. That doesn't mean I can't borrow from the people I grew up listening to, but it doesn't serve any purpose to sing the same kind of songs they sang. When you do that, it's going to come out sounding like an imitation, whether it's meant to or not.

Inspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

I don't try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

No, generally I think influence is used as a nice word for plagiarism.

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

When I listen back to my music and everyone else that's out there, I'm aware that there's something I can do that the next guy doesn't do.

I think of a band like Animal Collective where they really follow their own sound and I think that's a really important thing to do. You can find an audience if you can find your voice.

The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

I do know there's a lot of music where Led Zeppelin has been leant on. We didn't do anything about it. And I wouldn't want to, either.

I'm not trying to feed off of a concept that another artist had - that's not what I do.

It's either you finna create your own wave, you finna sound like me or you finna sound like G Herbo, you finna sound like Chance The Rapper, you finna sound like Juice Wrld. You ain't gonna get too far 'cause you sound like somebody. So, create your own lane and do your own style.

It's important to me that my music stands out. 'Taki Taki' doesn't sound like anything else out there, and it's hard to do that when you are on the road all the time, but it's really important to me that how people feel about my work. It was the same with 'Magenta Riddim.'

I aspire to be someone like Gillian Welch. What she does is play part of a group with two acoustic guitars with harmonies. She plays folk. However, there is no one that sounds like Gillian Welch. I aspire to come up with a unique sound like she has.

You can't complain about everybody that steals your sound. You'll be fighting for years trying to figure out how to make people not steal it.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.