Aldous Harding Quotes

On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.

I think the narratives on 'Trans,' 'Plans,' and 'Narrow Stairs' moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.

We started the band when I was about 19 or 20. At that age, it would have been kind of hard to imagine a lot of the stuff that I've written. We were playing garage rock. I wanted to dash out three chords and scream. But if you do that for 20 years, what's the point?

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 don't want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.

I decided it was time to pay tribute to my own songs, to give them the opportunity to mature and be adult.

My first album was me finding myself and my voice, finding how I sing. I was rolling with the punches because everything was new to me.

I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.

It took me a long time to find my voice as a singer, and I'm happy that I did.

I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.

My songwriting has evolved, just as I've evolved as a person.

Songs are really interesting in that way. Sometimes, they grow with you. Sometimes, you outgrow them.

The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.

As you grow older, your music begins to mature and grow older along with you.

I had no idea I was gonna be a songwriter, because I was too young to know my own evolution. I started playing the violin as a way to express myself because I didn't have a lot of vocabulary when I was 14.

You have to grow with the music.

It's good for people to be able to see an archive of an artist learning how to write and getting better, especially for teenagers who are starting to write: to see that I started out making pretty easy and weird and bad-sounding music and that you can teach yourself how to write over a long period of time.

I proved myself with 'Smoke Ring.' It was me maturing. I made a good pop record.

I think the music that I'm writing and the stuff I'm going to do as I age will age.

I think that the only goals that we try to set for ourselves is to evolve musically.

I'm constantly learning as a songwriter, so naturally that makes you grow as an artist. But I also think the more time I spend in music the more time I feel I understand it; or at least I understand where I stand amongst the industry and my identity within it all.

The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.

I think you can refine what you do, and become more consistent. And you write better songs that have a better shape and a better feeling. You evolve into and out of things, and go through stages, but, ultimately, you do improve.

You're a constant student, as a musician.

I think that every band tries to mature their sound through their existence, you know?