Aaron Dessner Quotes

When you’re working with someone new, it takes a second to understand their instincts and range. It’s not really conscious.

I grew up fly fishing when I was a kid. The feeling of it is fun. I went fly-fishing on Lake Delaware once, and I caught a record brook trout.

I had been living with my family in France as COVID was starting to spiral out of control in Europe. I said to my wife that maybe they should come back to the States with me because I was worried about getting separated.

Anyone who’s speaking up about anything becomes a target.

I busked a few times in Asheville, North Carolina, when I was 18. It was terrifying. I was probably just trying to meet girls.

There are some things that you see that are hard to talk about. You can’t talk about it. You just bear witness to them.

I think for me to be involved in a festival, there has to be a strong element of songwriting and musicianship.

There are so many books out about Abraham Lincoln out now because it’s the bicentennial of his birth. I’ve known a lot about the Civil War, but I’m just getting more into it.

David Longstreth is one of the great guitar heroes of our generation.

I guess I like minor chords better than major ones, in general.

Die Like a Rich Boy’ has, for me, some of the strongest lyrical content I’ve heard in many years; an epic love song laced with dark imagery and acerbic social criticism.

I’m probably more obsessed with football that I am with music.

I do have a way of playing piano where it’s very melodic and emotional, but then often it’s great if whoever’s singing doesn’t sing exactly what’s in the piano melody, but maybe it’s connected in some way.

If I’m not working on music, I’m probably torturing my infant daughter, Ingrid, with kisses or running or playing soccer in the park.

I tried hard not to think about the scope or scale of making a record that would be heard by millions and millions of people. I did a pretty good job of tuning that out.

My wife is from Copenhagen and her father has been a huge Liverpool supporter since the early 1960s.

The great thing about being on tour is that… the band plays at night and other than that we have a lot of free time.

I thought I was going to play soccer in college.

There’s political content in almost every song we’ve ever written on some level. It colors everything.

The song ‘Hymnostic’ is kind of a gospel song, and that song is really fun to sing with as many people as possible. And anyone can sing it, you know?

I always want to have time to experiment, and have transitional things, and have these weird non-songs, but usually the stuff I’m working on comes down to this weird deadline, where it just never happens, and it’s kind of a bummer.

I’m very fortunate and grateful to wake up every morning in the rural countryside I live in, looking at farmland and these beautiful mountains.

And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.

Seven’ is this kind of nostalgic, emotional folk song.

It’s very exciting to have a festival in the heart of Boston. It’s an amazing experience to be in a city and to be able to walk in and out of a festival. I think that’s part of what’s going to make Boston Calling really special.

We’ve always been trying to climb this ladder that leans so hard on our own idea of what our big songs are. We realized recently that we’re not a band with big songs.

It’s actually not that hard to play guitar in a rock band.

One of the hardest things about being a musician is finishing a project and then having to wait three or six months to publish it and to do all the sort of promotional behaviour.

Just because you listen to The National, Spotify might tell you that you want to listen to The Lumineers’ music. Well, maybe you don’t.

Sometimes you become the person people try to pin you into a corner to be, which is not really fair.

One of the negative sides of a really intense arc as a touring band is there are big gaps in your memory because you’re so exhausted.

Music for me is an emotional necessity. It’s therapy. It’s what I live and breathe.

From the very beginning, we just sort of made things up together. That’s one of the great things about having a twin brother; you have a sort of feedback loop, where you can bounce things off of each other.

There’s no one songwriter in the band. It’s collaborative, and we all have different tastes.

For whatever reason, you gravitate to certain subjects, and I read a lot of history.

Whenever I write anything, I do sing to it, to try and make sure it’s interesting or compelling to sing to. I’ve gotten in the habit of sharing that with other, more charismatic vocalists.

Sometimes my brother and I – we’re twins, and sometimes we joke that we’re like a two-headed monster. We can be hard to deal with because we don’t break ranks; we stick together.

I think the idea is that every time we perform Big Red Machine music it should be different somehow – like, different people, different songs maybe, definitely different versions of the songs.

I am an expert at applying premade pesto to pasta.

Big Red Machine is really a community effort: I guess it involves almost 30 musicians. It does come out of our friendship, but it’s really something that is deeply collaborative.

The Planned Parenthood 7″ project is an example of us putting our noses to the grindstone on and trying to make a little difference. Working on that was my way of handling my own emotions about Donald Trump. I was talking about politics for so long, I just kind of ran out of juice on that.