Top 50 Beck Quotes

If someone is making a judgment when they don’t have firsthand experience, it’s intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don’t know about?

I always loved art shows at schools. My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It’s some of my favorite art… It’s more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.

I think my whole generation‘s mission is to kill the cliche.

Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn’t even get a gig.

We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they’re like, I don’t know about this one.

You can’t meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you’ll start walking pretty weird.

Every time you go in, it’s like starting over. You don’t know how you did the other records. You’re learning all over. It’s some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

I’m just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it’s not usually on purpose.

I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It’s At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.

I didn’t want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial.

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That’s all I want them to be – crumbs. I don’t want to work any kind of fabricated message.

If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there’s all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs‘ success, there’s artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it’s notated.

The cliche of what a rock star is – there’s something elitist about it. I never related to that. I’m an entertainer. I think of it as, you’re performing for people. It’s not a self-glorification thing.

I hadn’t done much rapping in a while. I really wasn’t sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn’t really required of me.

Sometimes I’ll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I’m not technically a rapper, whatever that means.

I had long hair when I was a teenager.

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

I wish I had more confidence. I think that’s probably my Achilles‘ heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense.

I feel like I’ve spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it’s probably four and a half years at the most.

As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.

When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.

I would love to do an electronic record. There’s just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by.

I didn’t go to high school. I never felt connected to people my age.

I love British humor. It’s just so – surreal.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn’t something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.

I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it’s usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory – that’s not really my world.

I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There’s shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That’s why I pay no mind.

I’ve personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.

There’s never any pressure on the music having to be something.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone‘s going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people’s entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

To me, ‘rock star’ conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.

The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There’s only so much you can do with one record.

If we look at the fact that record covers are essentially advertisements for the music, we acknowledge a function and purpose to draw in the prospective buyer.

I didn’t want to do something typical.

Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I’m writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

There’s something different that happens when you’re writing a song for your own record that you know you’re going to sing.

I sat out a few years because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.

It’s really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out.

I did that Grammys thing – I did a little freeform poem.

Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.

There’s 40 or 50 songs that nobody‘s heard that I’ve done in between albums. There’s a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that’s never been released.

In recording, you’re trying to make something work sonically – getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound – and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn’t sound as cool. On paper, though, it’s all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don’t really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.