Quotes About Authenticity

I love Michael Bay movies. I don't think I'd be selling out if I did one. I happen to like his movies. I think selling out is doing something you don't believe in, and you're doing it for a selfish purpose.

I think what's captivating about me on the microphone is my honesty.

I don't want to be the guy who's 50-something years old sitting in front of a microphone with my beard dyed black and my hat on backwards, yo-yo-yoing.

It's all about being comfortable, forgetting there's a microphone in front of you.

Even if people say you look cool and you did well, it's extremely cringey to watch yourself rocking out. It's like listening to your own voice on an answering machine times a hundred, because you're hearing your voice through a microphone outside of a PA at a hundred decibels.

When it comes down to the music, it's just you and the microphone. It's not you and the record execs.

That's why I like the indies: because I like being who I am. I get to be who I am in the ring, on the microphone, everywhere. It's great. I never have to get out of character because I am Matthew Riddle.

I want the fans to know that just because we have a microphone; we're no different from you.

It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

There's something actually more intimidating about playing a small, intimate room. Your mistakes are that much more under the microscope.

The real middle class India that has always been looking for a voice that is its very own. I write about it because I belong to it.

I come from a middle class family, so most of my content comes from home.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

There is an epidemic right now of girls dumbing themselves down... in middle school because they think it makes them attractive.

I went through a lot in middle school, and you always try so many different looks and try to be so many different people. I finally realized I'm awkward, I'm lanky, and I'm going to embrace it - make fun of myself and just laugh.

In middle school, one day this girl was like, 'One day you wore Abercrombie, and one day you wore Quicksilver.' I was like, 'Hold on... what?' I'm usually really calm, but I kind of went off on her. Because I decided to wear Quicksilver one day, you can't place me? How stupid to have to live inside that box.

You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.

I don't want a middle-aged white man telling me how to write my feelings. It's not gonna work for me.

Sometimes you do get caught up in the midst of becoming... a product, a brand, and not having a say in any of that.

Being from the Midwest, I would say that I like that East Coast mentality, it's more direct. What you see is what you get.

I just think - the Midwest, if you grow up there, you're deathly afraid of putting on airs. Any time a Midwesterner criticizes someone, it's usually involving some form of being too big for your britches.

I feel very Midwestern at my core.

If everyone's rocking the same cool, hard-to-find fabrics, they might not be as cool and hard to find as you think.

It doesn't interest me to be Harrison Ford. It interests me to be Mike Pomeroy and Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan. I don't want to be in the Harrison Ford business. I take what I do seriously, but I don't take myself seriously.