Angel Olsen Quotes

I'm a 50-year-old guy making music for over 20 years. I've been writing songs since I was 20, so it's really been 30 years, and it's always been personal, but I've always told stories.

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies.

After moving to England I did some recording and eventually formed an English band, this was together for quite a few years with only a keyboard replacement. The band had no name, just my name.

I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13.

We started the band when I was about 19 or 20. At that age, it would have been kind of hard to imagine a lot of the stuff that I've written. We were playing garage rock. I wanted to dash out three chords and scream. But if you do that for 20 years, what's the point?

A lot of the songs that I wrote during 'Pt. 1' and 'Pt. 2' are the first songs that I ever wrote that sounded like that. I was in this phase - a certain creative space in my life - personally and musically.

Whenever I'm done with an album cycle, I still wanna write music. If I'm bored when I'm at home, which never happens, my first instinct is to go to the piano and bang something out.

Drums isn't my one thing anymore. I love to produce. I love to make tracks, write tracks, produce tracks, and I can't just sit back as a drummer anymore.

I just started playing guitar and started singing and started working on this act that I would call 'Don McLean' when I was probably in high school.

Whenever I can squeeze it in, I'm writing and recording.

I never stopped recording, but I went through a period where... The one thing that a lot of people don't know is that for as long as I've been as artist, I've been a writer and a producer.

I started playing and writing songs when I was eight.

Everybody in Lynyrd Skynyrd loves different styles of music, and our minds are very open when it comes to writing our songs and making the band true to what the band is, but also stepping out and doing something current.

I was 15 when I started making music properly.

I started singing very early. I was six or seven years old, and I was singing along to TV commercials and figuring out, 'Oh, hey, I can sing in tune. This is really cool.' But the songwriting thing came much much later, when I was 19 years old.

Being in a band was so fun and exciting, but I was just kind of focusing more on performance and wasn't really writing the songs - I didn't really think I had a voice.

Growing up, I've always wanted to be a rock star.

The art of songwriting is just stumbling your way to something really special, and you don't know what you're going to write until you are writing it. There is no formula. And, sometimes, you really have to work at it and hunker down.

I have always been a fan of the Guillemots. Fyfe Dangerfield, the lead singer, has recently produced a debut solo album called 'Fly Yellow Moon'; he has the most amazing voice ever.

Songwriting was definitely first. I started singing, and then I was rapping; then I went back to singing. As I was growing up, I just taught myself piano and guitar.

I'm just writing less of my own music lately - I go in and out of phases a lot. Sometimes there are these accidents that just sort of happen, that are kind of waiting around the corner. I guess Modest Mouse was one of them.

I think my best songs come from me sitting at a piano, bashing my head against a brick wall for hours and hours on end to get one good melody.

I've wanted to do a solo album since 2000 when I was writing songs for the 'Machine' record.

I've always wanted to do a solo project. I've always known I wanted to be a musician.

When I first started making music, I wrote the lyrics first, but now, because the music has got kind of wilder, I've flipped it.