Feist Quotes

I sometimes don't know what songs are about for several years after I've written them.

Every time I write a song my approach changes.

For the last three years, I've been working on 'Bromst,' and that's all that encompassed my brain. And now that it's out, it will change the way that I think musically.

My songs are always four years ahead of me. They're like my teachers.

When you're young you don't think, 'This person is going to change your life.' But when you start recording your own songs, it comes back and reminds you.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'

I write in my sleep. I don't know how, but I'll work on a song, go to sleep and it's finished when I wake up.

I'm not the same young man I was when I first got into music.

I always make a point to make my records different. Let's say I have a record that's influenced by hip-hop in an abstract way; for the next record, I'd try not to do that. They are all connected in a personal way but it's important not to repeat myself, because then I can always learn something about myself through my work.

I feel like my music is like - there are always new influences in there.

I'm passionate about transformation.

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

Think of a crucible as an occasion for real magic, the creation of something more valuable than an alchemist could possibly imagine. In it, the individual is transformed, changed, created anew. He or she grows in ways that change his or her definition of self.

The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.

The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision

What she couldn't put into word was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other

The first song I wrote was the first song I remember thinking, "Well, maybe I can do something here." The very first one. By the second one I knew I could do something.

So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.

People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that, well, I hope, for the sake of God, that you have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don&'t change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing, its knowledge should be expanding.

For a long time, I thought you could remain isolated and survive, and I didn't want to change that. But over the last three or four books, I've become more comfortable with the idea that I'm not really throwing anything away by being a bit more open about my books and life.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

It isn't a hunch but the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind, at work. That is the mind which makes artists do things without their knowing how they came to do them. Perhaps with me it was the cumulative effect of a lot of little things individually insignificant but collectively powerful.

Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.