Adam Yauch Quotes

People ask me all the time which I would prefer doing more, but I honestly can't say. When I'm filming, I'm like, 'No, this is my favorite,' and when I'm writing music and recording and performing, it's like, 'This is definitely it.'

That's when we decided to stop in '66. Everyone thought we toured for years, you know, but we didn't. I joined in '62, and we'd finished touring in '66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other... and create any fantasy that came out of anybody's brain.

I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

I would never take part in one of those Eighties nostalgia tours, although I've been asked many times, because it's like admitting you have nothing new to offer. As long as I can keep making music I'm happy with, and people want to come to my gigs to hear it, I'll carry on.

I hardly ever listen to any of our old stuff now. Once the songs have been recorded and put on to vinyl they become someone else's entertainment, not mine.

You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.

I've done lots of songs for film soundtracks and things like that - stuff I'm not ashamed of, but that doesn't represent my legacy with the Pretenders.

Ultimately, if I'm really moved by something, it's going to go on the record and that's that.

Each album has its own cycle. We wanted to capture all those feelings and moments for this touring cycle.

When I'm making a song that's very Grimes, it just feels very insular and it feels weird to have someone else do something on it.

I learned from Van Morrison and BB King that the first take is the best. It's about capturing a moment. It's the same as love's first kiss. If you try to do it again, it doesn't work so well.

Whether you hear me come out with another album or whether you hear any one of the Clan members, we're always going to involve everybody. When I look at 'Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Part II,' I look at that as a Wu album. You feel me? Even though it was my brand and my thing that I done, I had my dudes on it.

I'm a pop princess at heart. Pop is about distilling what you want to say and making it easy. And the way I write isn't about making things easy. It's a weird juxtaposition.

To actually put the time and energy into an album that would be better than Pull would be a hell of a lot of work, because I took that band really seriously, way more seriously than people took us. If you go back and listen to the records, you can hear it.

When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

You don't see me in the club. And the reason is because I would rather be in the studio mixing these musical potions. Now sometimes they blow up in my face, and there's a lot of smoke. But that's who I am. Music is what I do.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

In the first year in New York, I went to this amazing teacher named Jen Waldman. She does lots of different classes, but one of her classes was where you went and worked on a song. And suddenly I felt like an artist again, and because I had worked the whole song, when I went into the audition room, I could connect to something in the 16 bars.

I never stopped recording, but I went through a period where... The one thing that a lot of people don't know is that for as long as I've been as artist, I've been a writer and a producer.

I have all of these lives that I want the music to live, but at the end of the day, it's out there.

I feel really relevant and creative, and I don't think I would've made an album if I didn't feel relevant. I wouldn't have said a word.

I just like to do things that people can remember, but I wanna always do my own album and make statements.

Just because I front the band or we play bigger stages now, it doesn't mean we somehow suddenly changed the way we approach things. We all still view what we do as indie and alternative in terms of how we execute it, even if the actual music we make is more pop than our previous projects.

I'm constantly trying to create timeless music that many people can gravitate to.