Mark Mothersbaugh Quotes & Sayings

With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose. — Mark Mothersbaugh

It's people who write music because they are obsessed that I like; because they have something to say and no other way to say it. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Will Arnett and I were never in the same room, but once I saw early animation we started writing music for that and then he just kind of did his little rap over top, some of it was free form and some of it I made up, we all just kind of contributed to it. — Mark Mothersbaugh

When I was a kid, I would go to the record store, where there was a bin of things they didn't know quite how to classify. Those were my choices. That's where you would find Captain Beefheart or an early electronic album. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I was lucky enough to get to perform on stage in front of 20 million people on TV, and 150 thousand in concerts. For 15 minutes I got to be a rock star, the 15 minutes is great! It turns into Spinal Tap after 20 minutes. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Rebellion is obsolete - change things from the inside working out. — Mark Mothersbaugh

What makes games so exciting is that's a whole other- there's all sorts of other considerations on what music is supposed to achieve and what you're attempting to support, it's not uncommon to think of your music and to think of the way your orchestra plays for something like Jack and Daxter where you start with- you know because it has to change tempo and intensity as the action gets more intense. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I've worked with a lot of directors, some of them you wouldn't really attach the word 'artist' to their name. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there's this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities. — Mark Mothersbaugh

My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up to the television set and hit record. I'd tape my favorite movies and then I could go back and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn't have the visuals. But I think it made me really pay attention to the soundtracks. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I went to Kent State basically to avoid going to Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing in the world. I was lost, and trying not to get into a fight every day. — Mark Mothersbaugh

To me I think artists in general make a statement - and for the rest of their lives - every album, every book - are variations on a theme. — Mark Mothersbaugh

With vinyl you had twenty-two minutes per side. CDs came along, and you had sixty, seventy, eighty minutes and people felt like they had to fill them up. They were like those Fuji apples from Japan. They look like perfect, super-gigantic versions of American apples. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Before MTV, if you put out an album that sold 50,000 copies, your band could afford not to have day jobs for a while. That meant you could stick around, put out another album or two. Maybe it would be the second or third album where you'd make the statement you'd been trying to make all along. — Mark Mothersbaugh

We've turned down multi million dollar films, simply because we liked the film better. We have the luxury to do so - we have projects that make the money, and others that we do for love. — Mark Mothersbaugh

If you get rid of a lot of the poseurs by destroying record companies, maybe it's a good trade-off. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score. — Mark Mothersbaugh

My major was Fine Arts and Education thinking I would become an Art Teacher. I couldn't visualize myself as an art teacher, thinking how it wouldn't work. — Mark Mothersbaugh

TV series, there's a lot of everybody talking to you and giving you input for the first couple episodes, and then they're on such a crazy schedule that you get another episode on a Monday, you have to have it done by Friday and it becomes very solitary work usually, TV shows. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I really appreciate anyone trying to inject art into mainstream film. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I don't cook - I can cook - but I'm not very good. I like being asked over for dinner, because she can't cook either. We would starve if it weren't for modern technology. I know how to work a microwave, but love home cooked meals. — Mark Mothersbaugh

This is the fourth movie that I've done with this set of director-writers and I've learned to trust them at this point, because actually I started on Lego before they did. — Mark Mothersbaugh

If you're in music just to become a big, fat rock star, then I probably don't like your music to begin with. — Mark Mothersbaugh

I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Lego was our fourth film, because we did two Cloudys, so yeah there's a little bit of shorthand that's involved and then you can anticipate things- because for me it's like, I get a script for a movie and I go, "Wow that's a pretty good script", then you sign on and a couple months later they show you the first cut and you're like, "Whoa, how did that happen?" — Mark Mothersbaugh

When I'm writing a theme song for a TV show I always think, "What would be Pavlovian where a kid would be in the kitchen, or an adult would be in the kitchen, and they hear the theme song come on and it would draw them back to the other room so that they would watch the show?" — Mark Mothersbaugh

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical. — Mark Mothersbaugh

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism. — Mark Mothersbaugh

'To Kill a Mockingbird' represents Hollywood at its very finest, when a popular film could truly contain a message. It has one of the most moving scores of all time. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Personally I'm very happy to be behind the scenes. I like collaboration, I like working with directors. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Technology has taken its toll on albums in a tough way. The CD format and MTV really played havoc on artists. — Mark Mothersbaugh

Choose your mutations carefully. — Mark Mothersbaugh

We are shocked and saddened by Bob Casale's passing. He not only was integral in DEVO's sound, he worked over twenty years at Mutato, collaborating with me on sixty or seventy films and television shows, not to mention countless commercials and many video games. Bob was instrumental in creating the sound of projects as varied as Rugrats and Wes Anderson's films. He was a great friend. I will miss him greatly. — Mark Mothersbaugh

When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format. — Mark Mothersbaugh