Big K.R.I.T. Quotes

You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.

I don't want to put 12 singles on an album. I want to make a story, a little movie.

'Just What I Am' took me all of 10 minutes to make. 'Immortal' maybe took 30 minutes. It's not hard for me. 'Indicud' is almost what my first album should have sounded like, had I really been able to channel all of the ideas I had into music.

It's really important for me to have a record which has a strong narrative feel to it.

I like to have an album arc that comes from an experience rather than a story.

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

When you're putting together a concept album, it's all about the flow and the story.

As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.

I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.

It's really fun to get into that process of creating an album and telling a story. I really love it.

There are some great songs - like, I really like 'Snowcone' and 'Whelk Then' and 'No Problem.' I think I'm dissatisfied that it's not written from start to finish; it's over a year's worth of work that doesn't correlate.

I had always had an affinity for series in literature, and I thought it would be really cool to incorporate what I loved about books into the story of music, to pile it together.

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.

When you're doing a concept album, it's easy. It's like a movie: you already know what you're dealing with.

I'm without a doubt a producer first. The lyrics happen towards the tail-end of the process, mainly because they're more stream-of-consciousness. It's very rare that I'm going to tell a really concrete story.

I've had songs that were spread out over a number of years, and I've written some in ten minutes, and everything in between.

Every song is a long process. First I have to write a story for it, and then to make it into a song, I have to make it short and then shorter - so it's not easy!

A lot of times, somebody will say something and it will give you a good title. So you carry a pencil with you and jot that down. You don't just write a song right quick, though. You fool around and work with it. You have to keep going over and over it and see if you can't write a song that means something.

Some producers hang-on to that old cliche that if the audience hears the music, it is no good. I say this is so much talk. Music gives the film another dimension, if it's done with the story in mind.

This way of working on individual songs in isolation from other songs is actually how we've always kind of done it.

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.

I really believe in albums, even though some people believe the year of the album has passed. I love singular pop songs or tracks, but what really affects me most deeply is if there's an hour of music or 45 minutes of music that flows really well and tells a story.

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.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.