Lin-Manuel Miranda Quotes

People are getting away from the whole album experience, it's true. I think that's sad. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm an old fart. But I can't help it - albums are what I grew up with, and I still love them.

We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.

A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.

I hate the technological rip-offs that pass for music formats these days, and go back to vinyl to hear a good record because the sound is always so much fuller. I don't even like listening to music in the car.

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

The album's not dead for me; I still buy vinyl albums.

I love the sound of vinyl best. My sweetheart and I love to put on a vinyl record, it feels and sounds so much better.

When you're a songwriter, you don't have control over which songs get heard and which ones don't.

I grew up at the very tail end of the vinyl era, and at the time, I remember, we couldn't wait for CD to come along because vinyl was so frustrating. You would buy the record, take it home, and it would have a scratch, and you would have to take it back again.

I love doing third albums. A group makes its first album, and then the record company rushes them into the studio to make their second album. After that, they go, 'Whoa, wait a second.' They get a little more confident. They step back and say, 'Okay, now we're gonna do it.'

Apple, iTunes, and streaming services have made the single a more easy thing to access. What that's done has made the album as a collection of songs almost meaningless. But an album that has a concept or story or reason to be an album, if anything, has more meaning now than it ever has.

I've been sequencing all of my albums, from any Gang Starr stuff to Jeru to Group Home, all of it. I pay a lot of attention to that and really always have. I've even helped sequence friend's projects.

I am very conscious of first sampling the music and then getting it out for fans.

I grew up working at a record store and listening to vinyl. Even if it's side A and B, there's always this continuity that really turned me on about music.

When I started making my own music, I was more about recreating what I was hearing. I noticed that I had some control over what I was saying, and the effects that it's going to have on people. I wanted to focus more on the positive side of things, which are more in tune with my morals and ethics.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that. So the director's task is just that – to direct, to point the way. Then the actor takes over. And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.

I don't know which side is anybody on any more. I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order.

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

I need the kind of help that comes with a side order of help.

Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection.

The main joy I have in owning or being a part of my own label is the platform I've created to really push other artists and this other kind of musical muscle I get to exercise, it's not just me as a creator of music but me as a curator. That's been really exciting and I do get to have the autonomy and control and all those things with my releases, but now I get to go and find artists that I really love and like and share them with the world too.

I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.

Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.