Quotes from Washed Out

When I look back at the record and listen to it, I can sort of see where I was at when I was making it - these brief little moments, different places I was at emotionally.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

I'm not a very technical musician at all.

The thing that's good about music-making software like the DAW-kinda systems is that they're all generally the same; the kind of interface is normally laid out in a similar way. Depending on the program, the sounds might be quite different, but they tend to all have a drum machine or synthesizer or a sampler.

I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, and I feel like I can pull ideas from practically anything. You name it - I'll probably like it.

I've always written pop songs. I tend to take inspiration from more experimental genres, like ambient music, but at the root of the song, it's verse-chorus-verse.

I'm without a doubt a producer first. The lyrics happen towards the tail-end of the process, mainly because they're more stream-of-consciousness. It's very rare that I'm going to tell a really concrete story.

I didn't realise how much I ate Mexican food, like tacos and burritos three times a week, until I came to Europe and couldn't find any.

One of the great things about music is how it can take you places.

In your imagination, you can perfect things in a way you can't do in your everyday life.

I come from a background of hiding everything behind a computer.

I know of some guitar-based rock bands that refuse to record anything that they can't play live. But some of the best stuff I come up with are studio-based performances - bringing out whatever accident I had in the studio and building a song around that.

I was gonna work in a university, but no one was hiring.

When you work this intensely on something, the recording process becomes a bit like cabin fever. I shut everything out and, for a while, I totally lost perspective. To an outsider, I imagine the whole recording process sounds like torture.

I remember at one point, with a previous release of mine, I stumbled upon a shareware site, and the total number of downloads was in the thousands, maybe the hundreds of thousands. But there's no doubt that the Internet and that kind of sharing has been a huge benefit for the band.

I don't think I would change anything. I think we've done a fairly good job of remaining sane and making the right decisions.

The types of melodies I tend to write kind of have this bittersweet quality; they're meant to be uplifting but kind of have this melancholy vibe to it.

I was at a slight disadvantage in that I had never played in bands or done any performances before, and that's just as important as writing, recording, and putting records out. It's been a lot of hard work, balanced with a lot of pinch-myself moments of touring in crazy parts of the world.

Over a year's time, I felt like I squeezed in five years of touring experience, which was a really huge help moving forward.

When I'm not touring, I hardly ever leave my house. Part of it is I get to do what I'm most passionate about, which is work on music and make new songs.

The way I work is by infinitely playing a very simple loop over and over, and then I start layering things.

My first big influences were more hip-hop based - people like DJ Shadow and Four Tet.

For some, being involved in a scene is a great thing because the social element can drive creativity. For me, though, it's never really been like that. It's the opposite. I've always had this instinct to escape.

I felt like I was building this world brick by brick with each layer of instrumentation I was doing. I could see it growing in some ways. I feel like most writers feel the same way. You're almost living inside of this magic world that you're building.