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My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.

Stephen Malkmus

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Stephen Malkmus
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: May 30
Guitarist
Musician
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Songwriter
Santa Monica
California
Stephen Joseph Malkmus
Poetry
George
Careers
Male
Fans
Males
Wife
Lived
Situation
Intellectual
Bigs
Poet
Life
Career
Alphas
Like
Quiet
Alpha

More quotes by Stephen Malkmus

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I like that band Get Hustle. They're cool live. I haven't heard their records, though.
Stephen Malkmus
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I know the world doesn't need maybe another of [a particular type of song] - the same thing again - but you can't help yourself. And some people like it, but you kind of know in your heart that it's a lesser version of what you've done before. But maybe it has a good tempo, or it feels fresh, but it's still not.
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That's why you go to a nice studio. You can get a magic take. You don't really have to do anything to it.
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I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.
Stephen Malkmus
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The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.
Stephen Malkmus
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I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
Stephen Malkmus
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Maybe I don't have the patience to make a virtue of necessity - the patience to carry something all the way through, and to actually say something. Lately, the songs are more jagged and they don't really lend themselves to that. I just take it one bit at a time.
Stephen Malkmus
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George Oppen wasn't a larger than life personality, but I'm not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too.
Stephen Malkmus
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I'm sort of socially inept, so music is my way to connect to people. It's a means of socializing and having a life. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. I would just make home recordings and play them for myself. And that's not really healthy.
Stephen Malkmus
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So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like rock lyrics.
Stephen Malkmus
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It's normally in the morning, just playing around. And I'm not saying everything I make is great, but that's what I do. I can't even remember how I wrote stuff.
Stephen Malkmus
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When a band means a lot to you, you build the fantasy more than the reality. Always.
Stephen Malkmus
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I never decided to start singing, to be a singer.
Stephen Malkmus
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Everyone wants to be loved, generally. If you released a record and nobody said anything, if you didn't get any feedback from people you don't know, i.e. the press, you'd be sort of upset. To me, any press is good press.
Stephen Malkmus
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What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.
Stephen Malkmus
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What we're doing now, it's usually more based on records that I've bought or a projection of what I can do well now and the inner dynamics of playing with the people I'm playing with, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme, what we come up with. What works for us doesn't, like, have that much relation to the past.
Stephen Malkmus
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You don't realize that when you're young, and you're surprised there's a lot of people at your gig - you just think it's general British-press hype.
Stephen Malkmus
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We [ Paverment] were definitely unafraid of playing wrong notes and singing wrong things. We could be fearlessly bad!
Stephen Malkmus
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I've been getting plenty off my chest. Sometimes I get too much off my chest and I regret it.
Stephen Malkmus
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Most people want to be seen or heard. You want to shine. That's my way of shining.
Stephen Malkmus