Josh Tillman Quotes

I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane.

With sad music, or music that’s perceived as sad, there’s a sense of solidarity that can be really powerful. My songs are all joyful to me.

People used to see things that disgusted them and say, ‘I never want to see that again.’ Now we’ve reached the point where we see things that are disturbing and revolting to us, but we want to see more and more of it.

The main criticism people have of me is, ‘Why are you trying so hard? This guy’s exhausting.’ Yeah, I am! That’s my way of trying to get love.

I’ve engineered my life so that my only value in this world is in my writing, which is really dangerous, because if it’s a failure, then my life is meaningless.

You know, there’s an economy in lyric-writing that doesn’t afford you, or at least me – I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

I’ve been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.

I get sick pleasure out of going on the Internet and reading about how much people hate me.

I think Kanye West is a hilarious writer.

My music asks people to think critically, so how can I get upset when people think about me critically?

Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.

I love the exhilaration of feeling a pull quote come out of your mouth. The words just taste better.

I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it’s completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.

I was kind of bored playing drums in a band. Which was depressing, because playing in the band was kind of a golden ticket.

I was asked to audition for the second season of ‘Stranger Things.’ I didn’t want that level of exposure. I don’t want to be TV famous.

There’s a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.

There’s a difference between art and entertainment. Entertainment is really about forgetting about your life, and art is about remembering your life.

What a crazy coincidence that the teaching of Christ sees to be so compatible with late-era capitalism, suburban isolation, rampant consumerism. And so I am not ever surprised when I see evangelicals contort themselves to justify supporting Donald Trump.

I’m a dramatic, depressive person.

If music was made by some kind of critical theorist, it would sound like my music.

I was like, ‘Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.’

I had this revelation, you are a lot better at the between-song stuff than you are at the song stuff. That was devastating. And I usually find devastating things to be pretty valuable.

Laurel Canyon is kind of grotesque. It’s this nature-themed place, and everybody is kind of angry.

I’ve never taken the steps to be ‘successful’: I’ve never had a manager or signed to a publishing house.

My humor is my creativity, and my skepticism is a gift.

When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn’t want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off.

Love is the substance of human survival.

I made a decision as a child that I would never let anyone tell me that I was invalid or inauthentic, or that my experiences were.

Music is chaos. When I write songs, I’m opening the door to madness.

J. Tillman was kind of an alter ego. There was a lot I didn’t want people to know about my real life. With Father John Misty, I leave everything in: so much so that I lose sleep before these albums come out because there is always a line or two in there where I’m just like, ‘This is not going to go down very well.’

I think that providing obstructions in the live setting is when you get something that actually means something, as opposed to just aping your way through your greatest hits.

People who want to see things in stark dualities are not going to get much out of my music.

I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people’s eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.

It’s a vanity to think that a legitimate shamanistic experience can be purchased.

I think you only have to pull stunts if the content of your music is meaningless.

You can choose to live in love or choose to live in fear.

My guiding principle when writing with other people is that it’s not worth it to give someone a song unless it hurts for me to give them that song.

I play sad bastard music. For the money.

People think the world of music is so great, and it’s just not. It’s so boring, the way music is conceived and then declawed for public consumption.