Beck Quotes & Sayings

You can't please everybody, man, — Beck

Your heart is a drum keeping time with everyone. — Beck

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? — Beck

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude. — Beck

Some need diamonds some need love
Some need cards some need luck
Some need dollar bills lining their clothes
all I need is, all I need is two white horses in a line — Beck

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy. — Beck

I don't remember half of the new bands, though - and I think that's kind of where we're going. It's turning into just a big derby of songs. May the best song win. — Beck

I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002. — Beck

I had long hair when I was a teenager. — Beck

In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I'm not technically a rapper, whatever that means. — Beck

There's a perception that if an artist produces another artist, they're going to imprint on them. But I'm the opposite. — Beck

When I did "Top of the Pops" for the first time, Ace of Base was one of the other bands, and I have a memory of them on a small stage next to me in the TV studio. A memory of their performance is burned into my mind. Seared. — Beck

If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated. — Beck

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist. — Beck

I love British humor. It's just so - surreal. — Beck

It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out. — Beck

The only way I was allowed to play was by convincing bands to let me do a few songs while they set up. That went on for years. — Beck

There's a destination,a little up the road. From the habitations and the towns we know. A place we saw the lights turn low. The jig-saw jazz and the get-fresh flow — Beck

Whether you're aware of it or not, any kind of collage idea becomes a part of how you see the world once you incorporate media and internet and video games and all these things. — Beck

As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate. — Beck

Originally, the lyrics to "Girl" were really upbeat, and then it didn't work for me somehow. You need the dichotomy. If you're doing something happy and light, you need the shadows. — Beck

If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about? — Beck

It's so easy to criticize your own time, and I see that as a problem, even for myself, as a listener. — Beck

Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world. — Beck

I would love to do an electronic record. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by. — Beck

I've said for years to wives and mothers, you must start to see yourself as Sarah Connor. You must equip your children with the information they need to survive an ever-changing world. — Beck

Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays. — Beck

Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig. — Beck

Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary. — Beck

I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years. — Beck

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. — Beck

I sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back. — Beck

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out. — Beck

You just want to go back to those 70s albums. Even a lot of the 90s indie records were still done on tape, and you hear the difference. — Beck

If we look at the fact that record covers are essentially advertisements for the music, we acknowledge a function and purpose to draw in the prospective buyer. — Beck

My whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche ... it's one of the reasons a lot of my generation are always on the fence about things. They're afraid to commit to anything for fear of seeming like a cliche. They're afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliche. — Beck

I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial. — Beck

I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose. — Beck

I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it's usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank. — Beck

There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it. — Beck

[Early on,] the attitude was that what I was doing wasn't music. — Beck

I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation. — Beck

The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things. — Beck

I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for. — Beck

When I pull out vinyl - which isn't that often anymore - it's undeniable that I get a different feeling. There's a different physiology happening between the sound waves and the body that doesn't happen with music playing off the computer. — Beck

Lonesome tears
I can't cry them anymore
I can't think of what they're for
Oh they ruin me every time

But I'll try to leave behind some days
These tears just can't erase
I don't need them anymore

How could this love
Ever turning
Never turn its eye on me
How could this love
Ever changing
Never change the way I feel

Lazy sun your eyes catch the light
With the promises that might
Come true for awhile

Oh I'll ride farther than I should
Harder than I could
Just to meet you there

How could this love
Ever turning
Never turn its eye on me
How could this love
Ever changing
Never change the way I feel — Beck

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it. — Beck

It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be. — Beck

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else. — Beck

Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman. — Beck

Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know. — Beck

There's more well-known artists who aren't making as good songs as people who are just coming out of nowhere. That seems to be more typical in the last few years than ever. — Beck

I try not to do email; I try to talk to people on the phone. — Beck

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic. — Beck

I think it's interesting being American, the expectations for an American guy, and the image that has to be projected. 'Oh, I can't wear pink,' that kind of stuff. There's none of that in Europe. — Beck

Good Old Socialism ... Raping The Pocketbooks Of The Rich To Give To The Poor. — Beck

I've been practicing for years, trying to figure out how to record an entire band live. — Beck

There's an infinite amount of possibilities and detours and things that can distract you from actually just performing the song and having whatever emotion that's invested into the song come through in the recording. — Beck

When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the '50s/'60s generation was so dominant. — Beck

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record. — Beck

As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact. — Beck

With modern recording techniques, and living in the Pro Tools era, the process gets really drawn-out, and it can become painstaking. — Beck

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars. — Beck

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind. — Beck

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche. — Beck

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s. — Beck

I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music. — Beck

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. — Beck

For the records I've work on over the last 10 years, I get sent the really compressed version and the non-compressed version, and oftentimes you end up going with the more compressed one because it's what people's ears are attuned to. I think the bigger problem is saturation and people being desensitized. — Beck

You're just the girl of my dreams
But it seems my dreams never come true — Beck

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself. — Beck

Sometimes, reissues can be revelatory, or put the original record in a different light, but those are rare. — Beck

Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz. — Beck

Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air. — Beck

I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. — Beck

Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year. — Beck

The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing. — Beck

I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible. — Beck

There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing. — Beck

To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know. — Beck

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record. — Beck

You can't write if you can't relate. — Beck

I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense. — Beck

Let the desert wind cool your aching head. Let the weight of the world - drift away instead — Beck

There are plenty of Minutemen. People willing to be Minutemen. Where are the people that want to be George Washington? Where are the Benjamin Franklins? Where is Sam Adams? Where is John Adams? — Beck

There's never any pressure on the music having to be something. — Beck

In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs. — Beck

It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard. — Beck

What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give. — Beck

I grew up I guess you'd say in the cassette era. — Beck

I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most. — Beck

You spend so many months and years in the studio, and you see the clock ticking and so much time spent on the minutiae of technical things. And I just thought it'd be fun to do something extremely fast and get that rush of something that had some energy, something that you weren't tired of when you finished it. — Beck

There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts. — Beck

There are certain songs that just stick around and do something that transcends whatever time they were written in. Through different eras, people are able to impart different meaning to the song, and they become part of some sort of consciousness. — Beck

I have for four years now been ringing the bell. Economic Holocaust is coming. Economic day of reckoning is coming. — Beck

I remember you would record a guitar part, and we would have to sit there for 15 or 20 minutes waiting for the computer to process it. You'd see the little wheel spinning on the computer, and you'd be praying that the hard drive didn't crash and you didn't lose the performance. — Beck

I think everybody should just turn off their TV machines and make up their own songs about whatever comes to mind-their couch, their friends their loaves of bread. Everybody's got their own songs. There should be so many songs out there that it all turns into one big sound and we can put the whole thing into a pickup truck and let it roll off the edge of the Grand Canyon. — Beck

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message. — Beck

I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve. — Beck

There are certain records that you love because the songs are great, but you don't go to them as an example of great production. — Beck