Dan Smith Quotes

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.

When kids can't afford to see it anymore maybe we'll have a whole resurgence of garage bands all over America and this New Wave thing will start to mean something on a grass roots level.

When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.

Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.

It's nice to see bands you could see at a bar finally get a chance.

We started out as a bar band. We were sometimes playing in front of 20 people.

I never thought that I could make a living out of my voice, to be completely honest. I thought that I could probably keep playing pubs. And it was exciting for me to get even just a pub gig in my town or country, when I went to university.

I've been making music for a while. And I could read about myself on the Internet for a while.

When you don't have a record label and you have been on your own as we have, you can look at all these other ways you can get in touch with other people and get music out there again.

I never played coffee shops; I just played a lot of coffee shop-sized venues. I took every venue I could get my hands on.

I didn't have an agent, I didn't have a headshot. I didn't even know if anyone would know where to find me. I just went back to highschool and started playing with my band.

When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.

Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.

There's no platform for an unsigned music scene in the main cities - it's all hyped acts or showcases behind closed doors. I read about artists that are doing it 'the old-fashioned way' and touring, as if that's a unique thing to do - well, that should just be the way it is.

King Crimson were the only really famous band I'd been in.

I always wanted the world to hear my music, but I didn't know how I was gonna go about it.

When we signed our deal in 1974, we'd already been together for six years. When they lowered the drinking age in Ontario in 1971 to 18 years, we went from playing two or three high schools in a month to playing clubs two or three times a week.

I'm pushing ahead on my own - you no longer need a large record company to make you a star.

The band I've played with for 10 or 12 years now, we've been all over, but we mostly play in LA.

To me, being in the big time is not that big of a deal. I've been there; I know what it is. It's exciting, but it's also a lot of work and pressure. I love sort of flying under the radar where we can play theaters and sell CD's on the Internet, and it's really kind of a cool time.

Commercial success still hasn't come to an artist that isn't signed to a record label. There are very few artists that can succeed without the help of a record label. The role of the record label is still required, it's still necessary.

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.

We came out of a very provincial city that was not very supportive of music, and we had to do our own thing and flyer everywhere.

Because we spent so much time in the States in the beginning, we weren't able to do so much in England. It was slower catching up. And we didn't have radio here like what was called underground radio over there. So we got these little slots on the BBC.

I've been really trying to put people onto, like, my sound since I was, like, 17, 16.