Damon Albarn Quotes

I always start with emotion. That's where I start all of my improvisations, on the piano. I always start with the mood or the feel of where I am in that moment.

I am a musician who also does love to explore the world in many ways, so my approaching with my songs, videos, and haikus is: 'Make It Real.'

Normally I begin writing a song with just with aim to express something, and sometimes I don't know what I want to express until a sentence comes to my head that will sum up everything about how I'm feeling at the time.

I can look back over my earlier music, and it takes me back to the place I was emotionally.

With 'Philharmonics,' I had to do a lot of interviews, and it was like I was corrupting something. In many ways, I've said everything in the song. And either I can't go back to what it was because it's changing when I play it, or I still haven't figured out what the song is about.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I'm going through or what's going on in my life at that moment.

I think that music, being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is happening - the whole of human experience at the particular time that it is being expressed.

Composing is an emotional thing.

As a musician, it's only natural that my music mirrors my life.

I've been composing and performing for as long as I can remember.

When I look back at the record and listen to it, I can sort of see where I was at when I was making it - these brief little moments, different places I was at emotionally.

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

I was a young troubadour when I rode in on a song. And, I'll be an old troubadour when I'm gone.

Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mix tapes in the '90s than I did in college. You're learning about rise and fall and energy and tempo shifts. You're showing off your taste and your references. You're trying to be witty by - through placement of music you didn't write.

My singing, if you want to call it that is merely another medium of expression. Just an instrument I play. That's how I see my voice.

It's cool that you hear something, but what did you feel and what was your tactile and kinesthetic response to it? Those songs and creative sessions mean the most.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.

When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice -- and many voices have to be suggested.

I'm always interested in hearing how other people read and react to my songs. I hadn't thought of it in just that way. One of the things I love about doing things that are creative is that I feel like it's my right as an artist not to be affected by the reactions of those people that are going to hear my songs. But I also feel like it's the right of the people hearing them to have their own interpretations of what these songs mean. Sometimes people will see things that I don't see.