Music as Escape Quotes

I can remember being a young kid, twelve, thirteen years old just with my headphones on, on the train, listening to rappers paint these vivid pictures. Listening to Mobb Deep and feeling like I was in Queensbridge even though I'm on the Southside of Chicago.

I have my views and obviously my music has connotations that lean toward what I believe, but I've learned through other artists' mistakes that I'm never going to use my career as a platform for politics, especially at shows. People come to hear music. It's my job to entertain them, and it's my escape too.

I was kind of thrown into - I didn't expect to do this for a living, being a recording artist. I was just playing music for the fun of it and writing songs. That was kind of my escape, you know, from the humdrum of the world.

Oftentimes I feel like I can, through the music, paint a picture of something that I can't look anywhere and see in my real life.

I fight these strange personalities by getting into music.

I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music.

Ever since I can remember, I hated silence. I wanted it filled with guitars and melodies to sing all day.

I'm sort of socially inept, so music is my way to connect to people. It's a means of socializing and having a life. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. I would just make home recordings and play them for myself. And that's not really healthy.

I kind of just got right into playing music because I could kind of stop thinking when I was concentrating on playing the guitar.

Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.

There's always this joke that I say in Israel: people don't really have discussions; they just try to convince the other people that they are wrong or they are right - they just try to impose their opinion on the others. Sometimes I think it's easier to avoid talking about things and just make music.

As a musician usually music is your way out.

Part of why I started a band was due to feelings of shyness and social ineptitude. I saw it as some way of being able to interact with people from a safe distance.

I used to sit in my pickup truck at 7 o'clock in the morning outside my office and listen to the Replacements or something full blast, thinking, 'What am I doing here?'

Part of my desire to play music was because I wanted to escape the art world and the politics of it; the petty gossip-y art world. But you know, I feel like they're both equal forms of expression.

When I started with music, all I was looking for was to ensure I never had to live the life I grew up with. I wanted a foolproof exemption from pain and boredom. I wanted a life of constant amusement and leisure.

One of the reasons I took up the guitar was I didn't want to speak to anybody. I really felt uncomfortable speaking to people, so I took the guitar up so I could hide behind it. I'm not comfortable explaining things, because my brain doesn't work that way.

Music draws me in. As soon as I hear it, I'm there. I'm stuck in it.