Dean Wareham Quotes

I’ve come to see that these politicians that release books – no way are they actually writing those books. Not when they are working fulltime, too. There’s no way. That’s their name on the book, but it’s not their work. I’m sure of that. There’s no way.

Writing songs does not get any easier, and that might be because I am harder on myself than I was twenty years ago. Hopefully, as we grow older and change, there are fresh topics, new perspectives, or at least there should be.

I really like the last three Luna records a whole lot, especially ‘Penthouse.’ I think of all the records I’ve done, that’s my favorite. I don’t know why, really. I don’t know why some records turn out better than others. It’s not a science.

Writing a song is a long road. Or it can be.

The thing about interviews is that if someone interviews you, and they’re an idiot, then they make you sound like an idiot, too. They ask you stupid questions, and they bring you down to their level. It’s tempting to not ever want to talk to anybody, but you can’t do that.

One of the nice things about being in a band is that you depend on each other for ideas, so it’s not all up to me to do everything myself. There’s always that fear that you’ll run out of stuff. The most difficult part for me is writing lyrics, and that starts to get difficult after you’ve written, like, 120 songs.

Once you hit 40, being in a band – a committee voting constantly on what you’re going to be doing next month – it’s more of a challenge. And when you have a kid as well.

I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.

I have a slightly bourgeois upbringing, I guess. My parents paid for me to go to school, which is nice, but I haven’t gotten a dime since then. I have no trust fund. I wish I did.

People forget that keeping a band together is hard; man, it’s really hard. All the cliches apply about living in each other’s pockets; of it being a relationship, a marriage, a family.

There’s all kinds of ways to be misunderstood, and one of them is via the interview.

Galaxie 500 broke up because it was time. We broke up as a result of internal contradictions.

Great guitar players are a dime a dozen. It is sometimes your very limitations as players that set you apart from the crowd.

I think a lot of bands go on way past the point where they’re relevant. Some of them keep doing it because they’re making millions of dollars. Or people are afraid – they don’t know what else to do. It’s scary to get out of a relationship of any kind.

We are drowning in a sea of Myspace, blather, and too much information. Music is everywhere and nowhere. The independent record store is the solution, a place staffed by friendly (or not) people who are actually paid to weed through this crap and help you find the good stuff.

It’s easy enough to foist your music collection on your kids. Lectures are not required; you just play the stuff while they are prisoner in the back seat on a long drive, or softly in the background while eating dinner.

The first thing you learn about the music business is that it changes very quickly. You come into it at a certain point and you think you have a handle on it… And then, three years later, the whole thing has been turned upside-down.

It’s a scary question for a musician or songwriter today – what does the future hold? It is a strange time in the music business too; it feels like we are all in some kind of transitional period, stuck between old technology and new.

It’s hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band.

I’ve never played in Vegas. I’ve only been to the airport, but even the airport was exciting. Just flying in, looking out the window, you feel the pull of it, like it’s some evil force pulling you in, like Mordor.

My favorite Galaxie 500 album is the first one, ‘Today,’ recorded in three days at Noise New York and produced by Kramer. It contains my favorite Galaxie 500 songs: ‘Temperature’s Rising,’ ‘Tugboat,’ and our interpretation of Jonathan Richman’s ‘Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste.’

Rock is periodically pronounced dead by clear rock critics – killed by world music, or by hip-hop, or electronica, or the Backstreet Boys. But if you wait a year, it comes back to life.