Jenny Lewis Quotes

When you make a solo record, it's you. It's your name. It has to be the right songs for how you feel.

I just make the music feel the way I want it to feel, and I don't put it out until I'm totally happy with it.

It's really tough to make a name for yourself without compromising and without fitting yourself into a real specific mold. When I made the choice that I would be involved in every aspect of music and not necessarily make music for radio or MTV, I was saying, 'OK, this is me. You decide who it is.'

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

I mean, at the end of the day when I'm making a record, what I want to do is what I do.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

You have to find a sound that reflects what our souls feel like inside, how our bodies actually feel. That's why we made our own beats. We couldn't find a producer who could give us the feeling to match our lyrics.

I love to be in control of everything I do and everything around me. So that means, you give me a romantic lyric and I'll make the atmosphere, I will build on that. And then the song then becomes, it takes me to do the song, it's just a belief, it's just who I am.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

The songs that I sing and the songs that I write have always just been what I feel my voice does well, and what my inspirations have been and a kind of culmination of everything.

I can't speak for everybody, I think, for me, I will not be defined by the lyrics of my song. I am a man who does music. It's like clothes don't make the man, the man makes the clothes. It's, it's like that song don't make me, I make the song.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else. My style of filmmaking happens to be give the audience what they know they don't want, but they want. Ultimately I have to write and direct in a way that let's just say, you don't want to regret making a choice.

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

I'm very rarely interested in genres. As long as I feel I can put my DNA out there in the ideology, it works for me.

In my opinion, there is a huge lack of imaginative, unconventional music being created by artists today and what little there is, goes widely unappreciated by the masses. 'Port Blue' is my attempt at re-creating the music I want to hear and the emotions I want to feel." "If by chance you ever feel as though you’ve come to know these songs, please consider yourself a friend because in a manner of speaking, you know me. This music is my heart and soul. This is who I am." (Adam R. Young, 2006)

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

Into the Music was about the first album where I felt, 'I'm starting here'...the Wavelength thing, I didn't really feel that was me.

I made songs really for myself - I didn't ever expect to put it out there.

It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

When I started, I was 23 years old directing my own music videos; I'm co-producing on my album; I'm hands-on with everything. I'm more than just a pretty boy: I'm an artist. I'm not saying I'm a hip-hop music artist, I'm an artiste.

I feel like making music because - and this has much to do with the way I was able to make this record - there's more of myself in it.

I approach music - and this sounds crazy - as though I'm Phil Spector, and I'm cranking out these pop stars and forcing them to do all this stuff - except they're all me. But I'm not, like, transgendered.

When I left the Beatles, I made an album called McCartney that I played everything on. And it was kind of a cool experience. I felt like a professor in a laboratory, just crafting stuff and adding this, and putting this on and moving the microphone, and it was very homemade.