Ezra Koenig Quotes

To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It's always a bit excruciating because there's always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.

Making records is hard work.

I have a lot of milestones that I'm proud of when it comes to music, 'Amerikkka's Most Wanted,' I'm extremely proud of that. Just because of what I had to go through to get that music produced, that album produced.

I'm never gonna go into a studio and work for a whole year non-stop. Just every day on my own in the studio working, it's just too damn hard.

It took a long while for me to even put out a record because there were so many options of how to do a song, and in some respects, I'm never totally happy with the outcome.

Have I learned something from making records? Yeah, I've learned a lot, because I've not only made eleven of my own records, I've also probably produced that many records for other artists, and then I've probably played on, or been a large part of another eleven records with other people.

I don't think people realize how much work it takes to make an album.

Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don't know what it's like for a project to come easy.

Albums take a lot out of you.

It's getting harder and harder to feel inspired to spend six months on a record.

The actual making of a record is the most exciting part of this business.

It's always been difficult to make a good record.

The journey to the completion of 'Year Of The Tiger' was very interesting and full of a lot of trial and error.

I'd like to release solo songs on a regular basis, but it's pretty difficult for me to finish them.

I think I see a lot of artists struggling to make their first album perfect, and I've been there.

I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke. I've occasionally been criticized over the past couple of years for publicly "complaining" about how difficult drawing comics is, yet I've only mentioned it so that the younger cartoonists who are trying it out and finding it difficult and painful realize that they're not alone. There's not really any set way of learning how to do this, and it's always a struggle to improve, and, more importantly, see accurately whether or not one's work is communicating any shred of feeling or truth at all.

The world has changed a lot since I started making records.I used to go into a studio and there were songs there, chosen for me to see if I liked them. I wasn't encouraged to write.

I used to be a Def Jam artist. I was - I survived Def Jam.

The way I made 'Diamonds and Dirt,' which had all those hits in a row, was that I was just making a record. It was just the one that rolled up in my natural process, and it happened to be commercial.

Nothing in my life has ever come easy.

Every time you step out on that field, it's tough. There is no easy way to approach it and no short cuts out there.

When you play to an audience, you come away energized. It's the promo that really breaks an artist. Some lad sitting on a box trying to create a drum sound in a dry little studio. Everyone goes, 'Great - okay, now on with my day.' You go back to the bus, and you weep.

I tried hard not to think about the scope or scale of making a record that would be heard by millions and millions of people. I did a pretty good job of tuning that out.

When you make records, you gotta think about what's going to be happening at the concert.

Everyone always tells you about how amazing recording their first album was and how they'll always look back on the 'process' with fond memories. I will look back on it as an extremely stressful time that somehow also managed to be extremely boring.