Jarvis Cocker Quotes

It is not about writing those hits again. I am sure I could write them, but it is about the sensibilities.

I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it. But when I would cut an album, to me it represented the time that I spent since the last one. Just the way I was looking at the world.

Every time I write a song my approach changes.

For the last three years, I've been working on 'Bromst,' and that's all that encompassed my brain. And now that it's out, it will change the way that I think musically.

I just think that there is something that keeps us together, to keep doing what we're doing. I can't really put my finger on it other than each record is like a little snapshot of my life at that particular moment, the way I play, the way I sound, the way I wrote, the way I sing, I can hear it.

There are people who compose from very young. That is not my case. I went discovering myself.

I'm just writing less of my own music lately - I go in and out of phases a lot. Sometimes there are these accidents that just sort of happen, that are kind of waiting around the corner. I guess Modest Mouse was one of them.

A lot of the songs that I wrote during 'Pt. 1' and 'Pt. 2' are the first songs that I ever wrote that sounded like that. I was in this phase - a certain creative space in my life - personally and musically.

I'm going to make music that reflects me and my life now. So I think people who like my music and who listen to me should appreciate change as well, because I've definitely evolved, and that's a great thing, to celebrate that is what music is all about.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time.

It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.

I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.

There's a song called 'All We'd Ever Need,' which is actually the first song that the three of us wrote together on our first album, and when we wrote that song I didn't have any real experience to pull from.

There have been times I've planted stuff in songs where four years later I'll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind... and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I'll hear a line from a different vantage point and it'll change its meaning. It's something I wrote but it changed because I did.

I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.

My songs are always four years ahead of me. They're like my teachers.

It's so funny because I listen to songs that I recorded that I didn't really know anything about at the time. Later on I'm starting to feel the songs. Sing them first, feel them later.

Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.

'Lucky Man' I wrote when I was twelve years old. I wrote it when I first was given a guitar by my mother. I only knew four chords, but I used them all to write that song. And it just stayed with me, stayed in my head. I didn't even write it on a piece of paper. I remembered it.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.