Jens Lekman Quotes

I want to keep - this seems so corny - I want to keep growing as an artist.

Art school can be a wonderful place if you're trying to find your voice and your style and your taste.

As an artist, you keep learning. You draw out different parts of you.

I think everyone probably starts out sounding like someone else, but gradually you develop your own sound.

In middle school, I started to draw, and my pencil sketches were huge. They were these 4ft by 3ft drawings, and I got a lot of attention for that, so that was very validating. But I didn't start cartooning until I was in college.

I think a lot of singer-songwriters get compared to each other, but I'd like to think that what I'm doing is special and specific to me.

I know who I am as an artist and I know what my sound is, but I wanted to know what I could do in order to take it to that next level. So the experiences I had last year of moving to California and traveling to places like Rome and Nicaragua where I met a lot of people just had a really big impact in my life.

I want to be the kind of artist who keeps pushing on every album. I don't want to settle on a sound.

I think, like any artist, those baby songs are not the best things you've ever written, but they count because they're you're first attempts at creating art and expressing yourself.

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

You're always going to sound like yourself, but you can make really strong attempts to keep some similarities, but move away from what you did before for popularity's sake.

In the beginning, I wrote OK songs, but they didn't have a unique perspective.

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

I never thought of myself as being the singer that wanted to create an identity and then stick to that.

My view of myself as an artist expanded because of the time I spent at Cal Arts.

I'm kind of still learning my voice and learning my style.

Yeah, I put out some goofy stuff. I had no idea who I was as an artist at all before 'Posse on Broadway.'

When I wrote my debut album I was around 17, I didn't really know what my sound was or who I was and what I wanted.

I'm now able to show who I am as an artist.

I don't try to copy anybody - I mean, I'm not trying to become another Sinatra. I merely sing the way I speak.

I could have pigeonholed us and wrote a whole record like 'Pumped Up Kicks,' and we would have been this breezy, nostalgic West Coast Beach Boys recreation band. That's not the type of writer I am. Once I try one style, I move on.

I don't know how to write or to be anything other than Bananarama-ish because that's who we are.

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.

To listen to my first record, it doesn't sound like me.