Beck Quotes

I had this big thing about guitar harmonies. I wanted to be the first to put proper three-part harmonies onto a record. That was an achievement.

The Beatles production is often so 'perfect' that it sounds computerized. 'Sgt. Pepper' really does sound like it took four months to make.

I needed an opportunity to get back in the studio and get my recording chops back together.

We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording - that's why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn't even songs really. It was just sound.

I'd often use a Leslie cabinet on its own in the studio because everyone in the late Sixties and Seventies was experimenting with them. We'd stick anything through a Leslie because it made everything sound so good.

Being a guy who was a geek with tape machines in the early days and really interested in how records get made, I was inspired in particular by how the Beatles were innovating when they were making those records late in their career while using the studio in a maximal way.

We [with Rick Rubin] would focus on the ones that we did like, that felt right and sounded right. And if I didn't like the performance on that song, I would keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one, that it was right for my soul.

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.

I say that drums and bass should be very prominent, with vocals being the most important thing, and maybe very little guitars. I conclude by calling for no songs over five minutes and saying that I'm sure we'll fail at anything like what I describe, but hopefully we'll do that in an interesting way. Plans never work!

Demos are something you do in the early stages of your career, but when you get going, you just go in and record the song.

When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.

From a very early age, I started to get really interested in how songs were put to tape. Not just listening to the songs, but the way the songs were recorded.

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.

Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats. I was starting to learn the signifiers of production from the '60s, the '80s. We never re-recorded anything. All the record companies that wanted to sign us - except for one - were excited about the recordings that we had done ourselves.

Cecilia was made in a living room on a Sony. It was like a little piece of magical fluff, bur it works. El Condor Pasa a Los Incas record that I love. Bridge is a very strong melodic song.

Love is the single most powerful and important word and notion in culture and language. Until the power of love supersedes the love of power we have no chance of ever being successful.

Our love is like a song but you won't sing along.

I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.

Brian Eno taught us how to use the Recording Studio as an instrument.

What I do is so important to me. It’s like being a parent, in some ways, of a super-demanding , high-achieving child, with a cry that sounds really cool on the radio.

"Snapped" happened maybe like two months after I released the mixtape. I just like took a break from recording and that was the first song I wrote and recorded after the mixtape.

I've turned down songs that would be much easier to play on the radio that I don't think should be on the album. Maybe I've shot myself in the foot.

Then, you know, the other more-traditional role of the producer in, like, the kind of Quincy Jones sense is kind of part arranger. So you're coming up with, like, these - you hear these songs that are quite bare-bones, and you dream up what's the band doing? What's the rhythm section doing? What's the guitars, strings, pianos - that sort of thing. It's almost like a little toolbox.

Brian Eno records and music got me through. It made me feel like there were other people out there who had the same questions and fears and unhappiness. Particularly those kinds of artists who were writing songs about exactly those things.

My philosophy on writing a song for myself is that I always, always, always want to write a song. I always want to write a song. I realize that as a record producer or a singer or whatever I might not, if I recorded on myself or someone else, the first time out I might not give it the right treatment, so that the world or many people will accept it and it'll be a public hit, or anything like that.