Tory Lanez Quotes

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

I think they want to keep it separate, but I've never been a crossover artist for some reason.

It's all a matter of hearing what I like and seeing if I can make it fit into my style.

I think with everything I do, I'm trying to just come up with new ways of creating music and mixing styles together. That's just what's fun for me to do, to try to make myself inspired.

As a musician, you want to be your own favorite artist and be able to make the music that is an accumulation of all your favorite influences.

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.

I don't want to put a name on my music. Other people can put a name on what I do. It's just the union of what I've been listening to and what I've been learning. It has some elements of classical music, it has some rock, it has some jazz, but I don't want to give it a name.

That's kinda what happened to me: I listened to jazz, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll. And when I sat down to write a song, I had all these influences comin' through.

I always feel like the past informs my present musically.

We were big Clash fans, you know, big Who fans and I think we would listen to this music and talk about music and do nothing but music night and day, and when it came time to actually making our own music, you feel compelled to sort of tuck all those influences away, not show them.

There's a point with every record we've made that the album starts to assert its identity, and I think that's kind of what happened with 'The Wolf.'

Usually people think that it is the musicians who create the music, but in fact it is music who creates the musicians.

What I did was go into the studio and make music that I love. Make music that when you hear it, it feels good. Whether it was urban inspired, dance inspired, HipHop inspired or it just feels good period.

I try to not go, 'I'm writing a pop song.' Music is inherently genre-bending.

I feel like I have to create the Keith Whitley sound. That doesn't mean I can't borrow from the people I grew up listening to, but it doesn't serve any purpose to sing the same kind of songs they sang. When you do that, it's going to come out sounding like an imitation, whether it's meant to or not.

I feel like my music is like - there are always new influences in there.

Writing music - particularly music without lyrics - calls almost exclusively on the subconscious.

I think it's just a conglomerate of everybody's influences that comes out on the record, and live as well.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that's why it was interesting, because it wasn't music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn't necessarily thinking in the third-person then.

That's the sound we developed, and that's how we played. It took us a while, but we found it.

I think about all these influences and musical cultures, then the opinion of the audience is of course important, but when I'm working on an album or a new project, I'm not all the time thinking about what the audience will think about it.

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

I like to think of myself as a combination of Sid Vicious and Virgil Thompson