Quotes from Josh Tillman

I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I was asked to audition for the second season of 'Stranger Things.' I didn't want that level of exposure. I don't want to be TV famous.

Music is chaos. When I write songs, I'm opening the door to madness.

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.

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.

I think you only have to pull stunts if the content of your music is meaningless.

I'm a dramatic, depressive person.