Matt Skiba Quotes

A-ha is not me, Paul, or Magne: it is its own individual that has its own identity and characteristics. It is a result of a particular meeting point between the three of us.

I write these songs and I like the idea of letting the band interpret it as they will. This band is like any band; it's not just me. This isn't just a way for me to play my songs. There are four distinct artistic voices, and they deserve to be expressed.

I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I'm working with - what band, what musicians, what producer.

My collaborative albums are always way more enjoyable to make.

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 wouldn't say I worked with these people because I was looking for a particular vocal sound. I worked with them because I loved what they had done before-and because they really wanted to work with me.

For the most part, I really love being in a collaborative thing. And in a collaborative thing if you have a singer as good as Sean Smith or Eddie Vedder, you kind of think, well, why don't you just go ahead and let them sing? People seem to really like it.

We don't want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn't what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output - each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band.

Whether you hear me come out with another album or whether you hear any one of the Clan members, we're always going to involve everybody. When I look at 'Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Part II,' I look at that as a Wu album. You feel me? Even though it was my brand and my thing that I done, I had my dudes on it.

Movies are a team sport now, and I want to play singles.

Anything I do with Team Sleep, I'd do with Deftones as well.

Bjork, I'd love to do something with her. I'd love to do some sort of crazy orchestral choir thing with her.

A chance to work with the guys from Isis sounded like a lot of fun. I've always been into the atmospheric sounds they had created with that project and felt my sense of melody would meld well with theirs.

Every band needs it's own special chemistry. And Bez was a very good chemist.

Film is a collaborative art form. If you're not being collaborative, you probably shouldn't be working in film. You don't do it on your own. People who understand that, cultivate that, get the best results.

If you understand each other's way of thinking, you understand what kind of film someone is trying to make, and all the ideas that I come up with will fit into that film.

When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn't matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.

There's no one songwriter in the band. It's collaborative, and we all have different tastes.

I'd like to produce something with Kanye. Like, my production plus his, I think he'd make something really cool.

I only collaborate with the people I rock with in life, period. I rock with people where I really respect their craft and respect what they're doing. That's what collaboration should start from.

I don't love collabs just for the sake of collaborating. It has to be purposeful and it needs to sonically make sense.

The only time that I've adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called "Outside" that I did with Brian Eno.

... Everything we (the Grateful Dead) ever did was a demonstration of the value of cross-fertilization, It was unconscious at first, but when we started looking at each other, we had all these different influences... Bobby Weir used to call it electric Dixieland.

We all came to the conclusion that we have an undeniable chemistry musically, that we might not ever find again. The mix of friction and camaraderie channels good songs, performances and laughs.

I love working with different artist with different styles and different producers with different sounds, creativity is everything.