Ben Lovett Quotes

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

When I was a kid, I was into hardcore music. The scene in New York was tiny. Every person hanging out was in a band and played at the A7 Club. There was not much rehearsing or anything. Just doing.

Here in Ohio, the hardcore scene is a big thing, so some of our good friends are in hardcore bands. So we've had to figure out how the heck we get these people to respect us.

The first Decline I did was out of sheer love and appreciation for the music. In 1977, it was more about bands, because punk was a new form of music. It was groundbreaking and political.

The Midwest breeds funny, eccentric people, to varying degrees. You play shows not because you're expecting to get a record deal, but to do something fun outside of mowing lawns. Everything else is just gravy... Or mustard.

I was hanging out with Jonathan Richman last night.

Garage music came up when people weren't paying attention.

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

I didn't really see the British punk movement, if that's what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really.

I see a lot of connections between folk and punk music just because they're both subcorporate music - I mean, traditionally.

There's a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.

I think punk rock, especially for me, was a big middle finger to this whole talent thing.

I got my group together when I was about thirteen. We had a local radio show, and then we started touring for the principal of the high school - he was in the Lions Club, and so we were the entertainment.

We've been allowed to operate unmolested on the fringes of the music scene, really. That's where we enjoy it most.

When I came out with 'Posse on Broadway,' I decided, enough with trying to imitate New York, enough with trying to imitate L.A., let's just be Seattle. And rock, grunge, followed right after 'Posse on Broadway' and Seattle just exploded.

Hopefully after a year or two of touring around eventually we'll just be The Blanks. We do pretty much everything we do on 'Scrubs' in our show, but it's not presented as Ted's Band.

I never identified with 'indie,' I don't like that word.

All the serious bands, all the punks, came from Bristol.

For all its reverb and defiant noise, the sound of Black Tambourine barely reached past the borders of Washington, D.C., in the early '90s.

When we started out in the U.K., there were songs that we made, we put them on the Internet, and we immediately started touring the U.K. We borrowed our friend's mum's car, and drove ourselves around for, like, a year playing gigs in pubs and tiny little venues. In that respect, we're pretty grass roots as a band. We've done all that together.

Growing up, I played in different bands and did a lot of self-booked touring and traveling around, and my sister was driving us on tour, and we're playing for nobody and literally begging my friends that I went to high school with to buy tickets to our shows.

The thing about places like Trinidad and Jamaica is that they can be very musically insular. There isn't much space for kids making hip-hop, electronic music, or hybrid genres.

We were all friends who formed a band. We weren't auditioned or put together by a record label, management company or TV show.