J. TILLMAN

With sad music, or music that's perceived as sad, there's a sense of solidarity that can be really powerful. My songs are all joyful to me.

I play sad bastard music. For the money.

There's a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.

I think that providing obstructions in the live setting is when you get something that actually means something, as opposed to just aping your way through your greatest hits.

I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.

My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.

When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn't want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

It's a vanity to think that a legitimate shamanistic experience can be purchased.

I was like, 'Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.'

I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it's completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.

I had this revelation, you are a lot better at the between-song stuff than you are at the song stuff. That was devastating. And I usually find devastating things to be pretty valuable.

I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.

I've never taken the steps to be 'successful': I've never had a manager or signed to a publishing house.

My humor is my creativity, and my skepticism is a gift.

Laurel Canyon is kind of grotesque. It's this nature-themed place, and everybody is kind of angry.

I was kind of bored playing drums in a band. Which was depressing, because playing in the band was kind of a golden ticket.

Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.

People used to see things that disgusted them and say, 'I never want to see that again.' Now we've reached the point where we see things that are disturbing and revolting to us, but we want to see more and more of it.

I've engineered my life so that my only value in this world is in my writing, which is really dangerous, because if it's a failure, then my life is meaningless.

My guiding principle when writing with other people is that it's not worth it to give someone a song unless it hurts for me to give them that song.

People think the world of music is so great, and it's just not. It's so boring, the way music is conceived and then declawed for public consumption.

My music asks people to think critically, so how can I get upset when people think about me critically?

I get sick pleasure out of going on the Internet and reading about how much people hate me.

People who want to see things in stark dualities are not going to get much out of my music.