"I'm a pretty bad troubadour. I'm more of a music fan who got away with making records."
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Ryan Adams quotes (page 2 of 5)
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"A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I've never been able to find on any record, but that I've always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn't hearing yet."
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"I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation."
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"The weirdest thing I've been fascinated with nowadays is the new contemporary country music, which to me sounds like very strange '70s pop, and sometimes like rock music. But some of the themes in there - maybe it's because I know how the songs were written, but it really does sound like it was written by two or three people, with the idea to appeal to the most general audience."
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"My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me."
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"I have found in black metal the lyrics are profoundly beautiful... a pathos and mythos at the same time."
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"I think it would be wrong to consider 'Ashes and Fire' a love album. The record is obsessed with time. I believe that there is a kinder view of the self on this record."
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"When You're young, you get sad, and you get high."
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"I use to be panicked, but know I'm curious!"
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"There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas."
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"On Heartbreaker, I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs."
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"I've never been to Vegas, but I've gambled all my life."
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"It would be really nice to make a record that would be super-fun to play live - a record that would be funny, with a little bit of heart."
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"This is going to sound crazy, but I can hear music in my head. I can imagine a piano or a guitar playing, and I can sort of think out."
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"I'm not the cool thing, and I'm not going to be the cool thing for a really long time, and it isn't like I'm not the cool thing and I sell 3,000,000 records every time. I'm not the cool thing, and I barely sell 150,000 records, if that, ever. So I'm obviously working really hard to sustain myself. I'm actually a target to be dropped, because that's just not enough records for a big company."
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"Do you remember stormy winter?Well button up your coat, one's comin' soon"
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"I can sort of will that stuff to happen to me if I put myself in the right headspace. Then I can actually get to a space where it won't just be one song that comes through, but a series of them."
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"Sometimes an idea from six years ago will come to me out of the blue. And maybe I haven't even seen the lyrics I wrote down, but I'll just have this physical memory of having written it, and in my mind I can see the piece of paper, and the words I wrote down, and then by muscle memory, I'll remember the chords that go along with it."
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"It's hard to be bipolar and bicoastal at the same time."
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"It sounds like I'm channeling or something, and I don't really fully understand what it is. I'll get a piece of paper and write down what I think is coming to me. And I'll play it once. Whether it's being recorded or not, I can then usually remember it for a sometimes shocking amount of time."
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