Babatunde Adebimpe Quotes

I want to be around these positive, expressive people who are doing something different and who also want to get the hell out of there and don't want to be around basic human bullshit.

If you push hard enough you can change. You can take everything you know and round it up, turn it into something else, and keep turning things into something else.

You have to be a really talented writer if you're trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don't have the focus to do that, really.

When I'm in the mode of feeling positive about love, I don't really feel the need to mark it down in song. In fact, I know what that song would sound like, and I would not subject anybody to that.

No one wanted a job. No one could hold a job. You tend to see those going hand in hand.

You can physically move yourself around but there's that great line that Adam wrote: "Does it define for life, like print of thumb?" I think it does.

One second you're having the time of your life in front of all these people, and then you come backstage to the exact opposite - there's only lukewarm carrots back there.

Touring is really a weird social experiment, even though everyone thinks it's a party every day.

Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there's more than 808s in the universe.

Adam is one of my favourite writers, period. He has such a unique voice and he's somebody who I admire so much for putting the effort into inventing his own language and furthering it.

There are people who kind of let you know that you can silence the room.

I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.

The cynicism doesn't come across in the final; it can be taken as a very sincere plea for someone to not go away.

Most of the bands that I really hold in my heart - you don't think about them as bands; they're just the soundtrack of your life.

Painting and animation can be kind of long work. Music was more immediate and more fun.

I probably couldn't have the same experience listening to that song because I'm self-conscious about some of my singing parts.

I know that being upset without having an avenue to fix anything is a real hard place to be in for too long. But it's even worse thinking that it'll go away if you just ignore it.

If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.

I don't want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I'm doing.

A lot of people have reunion things, but I think bands are supposed to break up.

The feeling of being halfway through a show and just realizing that there's nothing you can do to save it - it's a horrible feeling.

Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I'm in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it's the rare band that doesn't, like, turn into something else.

I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.

I like the model of people getting together to make something when they want to do it and not being dictated to by a cycle.

Hearing that [David] Bowie passed was like you don't really believe it. It's as if the sky shifted a little bit, to remind you it was there.

There are a lot of spikes that can happen when what you're doing starts to get attention or people start to talk about it. They can just kind of really do a number on your reasons for making music.

It's insane when someone shows up to your show and is like, "You could run off with me right now!" I'm like, "It's cool, I think I'm gonna go read."

Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.