Stephin Merritt Quotes

Serious music isn't listened to in a casual setting. You don't want to listen to that in headphones on the subway.

Never try to do anything artistic when you're feeling something overwhelming. It's like driving a car: If you're experiencing road rage, pull over.

If you start out with a song sounding like Britney Spears, and you end up with a song sounding like Pauline Oliveros, you'd better have pretty good liner notes explaining what on earth you mean.

Well, there are certainly original things to say. But I'm not sure that a pop song is the appropriate format to say them in.

I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.

At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

I can imagine lyrics becoming better written by smart machines rather than stupid musicians. Songwriters generally have nothing to say. They may as well be replaced by machines.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

When you're making a singular pop song, you don't really need any subject matter. You just sort of say, "Uh, I love you." And then you try to figure out some rhyme for that, and there never is one.

I'm not too sure if I have a very smart approach to revealing my life. Luckily, I doubt if many people really care about my life that much.

Okay, a truly great song is a song that makes its own aesthetic intentions clear and then lives up to them and exceeds them in an interesting way. Alright?

Surf is that music which is entirely about evoking something. There's never any vocals, so it's not about the lyrics, it's about the reverb.

There's already a great deal to do writing the songs. And if I were completely in control of it, nobody would be able to say "this song doesn't work."

There are so many clichés in the world, especially in music, that it's a never-ending creative font to just bring two of them together and let them interact.

You stuttered like a kaleidoscope, because you knew too many words.