Caroline Polachek Quotes

I wrote my first song, 'Conversion', to this little hip-hop instrumental. I went to an open-mic, plugged my iPod into the P.A., and sang over the beat.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I'm influenced by a lot of different genres of music. So I'm constantly trying to rework production and make things interesting in the live show and on records.

I love when a song is conceived as a jigsaw puzzle in the studio, and then it's a natural to play live. That's my gauge of success for a song.

I want to write just as much as Kanye may have for whomever Kanye has written for.

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

As long as I'm around the cats in the hip hop scene, they'll throw me a track and I'll write a rap over it.

The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too.

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.

I think the greatest hip-hop artist of all time is Jay-Z, without a doubt. He just keeps amazing me with his performance, and since '96, that guy has been producing at least one hit every summer and every winter. That's a pretty good resume.

I really like the thing I did with Martina McBride. I had that song sitting around for a long time.

I'd love to do a live album, like a little bit old school but still progressive, influenced maybe by more electronic music. I like everything, but I don't know anything about music. So it comes in to a lot of different ingredients. I love hip hop.

I feel like everything I do in the hip-hop world has an influence. People don't really notice what I did until somebody else does it. As far as hip-hop goes, I want to continue to make good music, and good art. I don't really follow the state of hip-hop.

And to turn it into rap wasn't too difficult besides just rhymin' the last words of each line.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I read in an interview with Lil Wayne that he recorded a mixtape of something like 50 straight minutes of him rapping all of his material because he felt like he could never move on to the next phase of his musical exploration if he didn't get it down on tape.

Nas is an artist who writes from his heart.

That's the reason why I'm making albums. That's the reason why I love hip-hop: It's a challenge every time.

Dr. Dre I've always been a huge fan of. The Roots as well. The Roots gave me an appreciation for live music.

I'm not the first guy to make a record or to make hip-hop, but I did it differently.

A sold-out crowd is better than a number one. But being in the studio is better than all of that.

As a lover of both hip-hop and jazz, I feel like much of the latter community still doesn't truly embrace hip-hop as a musical extension.

Me and Future, we did 'Dirty Sprite,' 'Ain't No Way Around It,' 'Turn on the Lights.' Every time we record, we're setting bars.

I'm not Tupac or this prophetic dude or anything like that. I just want to make music and have fun.

I started by producing, and the rapping came second to that, because I wanted to fill out the beat.

It took me a long time to stumble upon a sound, and I figured out I wanted to kinda sing rapper's lyrics.