Flume Quotes

To write lyrics and sing stuff used to be a real chore for me, especially before this 'Diamond Eyes' record. I was spending years making records.

I think I see a lot of artists struggling to make their first album perfect, and I've been there.

I think with any songwriter the first 1,000 songs are always terrible.

I think when you get past your second album, it all becomes something of a routine. So you have to struggle against that, find a way of making what you do sound fresh and new each time.

It took a long while for me to even put out a record because there were so many options of how to do a song, and in some respects, I'm never totally happy with the outcome.

The journey to the completion of 'Year Of The Tiger' was very interesting and full of a lot of trial and error.

It's easy for me to write songs but hard for me to write an album; that's been my experience.

Every time I do a play, it's as if I've never done one before. I'm always confused. I always am convinced I'm going to be fired. I'm like, 'I don't remember how to act. I don't know how to do this.' And, it's just a very slow process, and then, all of a sudden, it's just there one day. I still don't understand how it happens.

To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It's always a bit excruciating because there's always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.

Each time I've gone to the studio, the songs have got better and I've got more confident.

I'm never gonna go into a studio and work for a whole year non-stop. Just every day on my own in the studio working, it's just too damn hard.

When you sample something, you're using the crutch of borrowing chords and melodies from a song that's already great, that's already stood the test of time, that's already special. When you're trying to do it all from scratch, you're writing something brand new that has to stand on its own.

'Somebody That I Used to Know,' like a lot of the record, was a bit of a struggle to finish. It was written fairly quickly - I wrote it in November 2010 - but it took six months to find Kimbra and really realize she was the right vocalist to make the female part come to life. There were constant hurdles.

The whole process of this record was an education for me as a musician.

Albums take a lot out of you.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

When I first decided I wanted to make beats and write songs and stuff like that, it wasn't like I sat down and the first thing I wrote was even halfway legit. It took a while to find my way through it.

Writing is the hardest for me. It doesn't come as naturally as the other forms, and I feel far more dread during the process. Acting and voice acting are more mercurial and maybe come a little easier to me.

I remember, when I first rapped, I was writing raps. I don't write raps at all; I stopped early. I don't know - it seems like every day I find something a little bit easier.

I think the third record is the hardest one.

It's good for people to be able to see an archive of an artist learning how to write and getting better, especially for teenagers who are starting to write: to see that I started out making pretty easy and weird and bad-sounding music and that you can teach yourself how to write over a long period of time.

I've been in the room or watched artists walk in who don't write, and you can't figure out what they really want.

No I.D. is like an alchemist and he'll only give you so much at one time. It's for the best at the end of the day, cause through the process of working with No I.D. I was able to soak up his perspective for songwriting and production and keeping music alive.

For the first three years, when I was writing, I was doing sessions with a whole bunch of different people all the time every day until I met Lindy Robbins, who kind of mentored me. And then, once you find that, all the pieces come together.

The most difficult thing for me as an artist, as a creator of music, is lyrics. But everything else, I just do it.