Nick Lowe Quotes

I'm the most indecisive person in the world. I'll do three versions of a song, then think, "Is the demo better?"

Sometimes I catch myself doing something that I've already done. The more I've done, the more that's likely to happen. Then I just throw it away. I wait until I've got the right way of getting a thing done, which means my songwriting proceeds at a very slow pace. But it's the only way I can really work.

I rarely like the music I make. It's like nothing's good enough. I just stay in my head, waiting on the next best beat, so I can do something better than what I did.

The hardest part for me is to finish a track. I start new projects all the time.

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

I used to play works in progress to people, but now I wait 'til it's finished, because you make excuses all the time: 'Well, there's gonna be an orchestra on it.' Rather than make excuses, wait 'til it's finished, and then they can say they don't like it.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.

I'm so hard on myself that when I'm in the studio, I'll write 10 songs and only use one. So those nine songs that are left over, I always think, 'Where could these go? Who could they be for?'

I've always wanted to do a photo book, but I've never done one because I've never felt ready; I just didn't feel my work was good enough.

I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

You can work on an album forever, but finishing it is a whole different deal.

I got songs; I just never release them. I don't know why. A lot of people say I need to put it out. I guess I haven't made it my focus.

I start with the aim of making something instrumental, and then I'm just like, 'Agh, no, it's not interesting enough. I've got to say something here.'

I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.

Whenever I finish a film, I feel that this is the worst film that I have made. This is bound to happen because while writing, directing and editing a film, I would have lived it 5000 times. Naturally, one tends to loose objectivity.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

If you are an artist and you are honest, you are never good enough.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

I'll go on making films until I make one that pleases me from the first to the last frame. Then I'll quit.

Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.