"The Flaming Lips have been on Warner Bros. forever, and certainly everything I heard growing up was on a major label in some way, from the Cure to Radiohead to Bjork."
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Quote collection
Win Butler quotes (page 1 of 2)
36 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The idea of dancing to bad house music is something I could never get behind."
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"Music is made by individuals. Some artists will be very politically overt in their songs, some will be more subtle. You have to be true to yourself, true to your nature."
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"Being in a rock band, I feel a certain responsibility to have a weird haircut. I mean, who else gets to do that?"
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"Years ago, in order to stay sane, I had to really make an effort not to think about how people view us. There's just so much noise, positive and negative, and not much good comes out of thinking about it."
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"What I miss [about church] is being forced to be in community with people that aren't the same as me."
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"Whenever you do anything or say anything, you're opening yourself up to criticism. But that's okay."
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"I think of hip hop as a mass media, radio, MTV thing. It’s been extremely relevant over the last 10 years and rock music is just not anymore—-a tear rolls down my cheek as I say that."
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"While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it's a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it."
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"A lot of stuff is dark in a way, but unless you're really looking at a situation for what it actually is, it's hard to be hopeful - or meaningless to be hopeful about it unless it's actually based in a real possibility."
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"I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me."
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"I studied scriptural interpretation, which is more about how people get meaning out of texts, looking at stuff in the Old Testament - Muslims, Christians, Jews, different interpretations of the same texts."
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"I think you have to want to be really famous. It's a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage."
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"I just wanted to make something in the world and worry about the rest of it later and not get too caught up in rules."
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"Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals."
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"When I was younger, bands helped me connect to part of my humanity; bands that had nothing to do with anything political helped to form me. There's a correlation in that: If people can connect to music, maybe they can connect to each other."
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"Songwriting is reliant on inspiration, which ideally you don't have that much control over. Songs kind of half make themselves, and then you have to finish them."
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"There's this idea, particularly in pop music and a lot of these pop father/manager types, that you're selling the person instead of the song. You basically want to create something that the fans relate to because it's exactly like them. So there's a lot of art that's made to be in the image of the audience, but then the audience is imitating this version of themselves. It's a really weird cultural feedback loop, and it's kind of strange to watch. It's a new thing since I was a kid, really a different thing."
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"Actual patriotism has to do with loving a place enough to try and improve it."
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"There's the idea that you have to know how to solve the world's problems in order to feel that something is morally wrong. I'm always back and forth between optimism and depression about the situation."
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