chic mastermind: November 2010

The Strokes' Julian Casablancas
"Even though the process [of making music] can be meticulous, the approach should be simple.
I just started doing things I liked; you know, sing along. I remember recording myself doing a
Pearl Jam song and just thinking, 'This is great.' And then listening back and thinking,
'Oh my God, I really can’t sing.' One step at a time."

Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O

"There’s a real heavy atmosphere of apathy in New York. That was in the air when we started.
So a lot of why we started was just to try and shake things up, to get people to feel something.
Just to have fun again, because New York was a lot of people standing around with their arms
crossed, bobbing their heads if they felt something. We were like, 'Fuck that, we’re gonna get
people to go fucking nuts.'"

Iggy Pop

"Music, when I’m singing or fronting, it’s definitely not coming from me, it’s coming through
me,like the way if water has to go through a rusty pipe it comes out a different color. On the
way through, I get some of my bits in."

Billy Corgan

"I subscribe to the theory that art is made to be broken and if I wanted to play a song backwards
at half speed, I believe, as the auteur, that’s my right. But not everybody agrees with my right,
which is kind of a funny thing."

Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig
"You never know when an idea’s gonna come to you. I’ve tried not to have to schedule the
creative stuff; but in terms of the creativity that goes on in the studio, we’ve tried to keep
business hours — that only lasts so long before we end up being in there every day until three
or four a.m."

Sinéad O'Connor

"I never regretted it [ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live]. Never in a
million years. And I mean I had the shit kicked out of me for years, and everyone treated me
like a madwoman. But I would do it a million times over."

My Morning Jacket's Jim James

"When you record, you have to accept the fact that it’s a finite thing and you’re only capturing
time for that moment. And it’s always hard to let it go when you’re done but also, at the same
time, you have to just let it go and be like, 'See ya later. I’m gonna look back at you five years
from now and there’s gonna be some things I like and there’s gonna be some things I don’t like.
And there’s gonna be some things I’m embar- rassed about and some things I love.'"

Fiona Apple

"Not to be gross, but music is sort of a creative mental form of shitting. You keep taking things
in and putting them out to make more room to take more nutrients in. Life nutrients:
conversations with people, experiences, seasons. Hopefully, though, what you put out isn’t shit."

Silverchair's Daniel Johns
"I feel like the best music I’ve ever made is the music I kind of wasn’t present for. Most of the
time I don’t really know what I’m doing. Especially recently, it’s more about sonics and getting
everything sounding like it has some kind of emotional resonance. And then after that, that’s
when you start: after you’ve laid down a foundation, that’s when you start thinking about
where it’s coming from. But at the start, it’s not coming from anywhere."

Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard
"I just feel that being a writer in any kind of capacity has more to do with just working the
muscles. The longer you go without writing, those muscles atrophy a little bit and you become
less able to harness a good idea when it comes across your brain. I feel it’s important for me.
I’m a songwriter. That’s what I do for a living. So I should try to write songs every day."

Yoko Ono

"Imagine standing outside the Universe and listening to the music it creates! It’s nice to know
that we are a part of it."

Ozzy Osbourne

"I don’t play an instrument, I don’t really know how to sing. But it’s this thing within me.
The bad thing about being me is I’ve got this thing in my head, but I can’t always transcribe it."

Music, a new book and documentary by Andrew Zuckerman