Bradford Cox: A lot of Appalachian music has a certain haunted, foggy...

I'm tired of watching attractive people trying to be ugly, struggling for authenticity. Why not be yourself?

Bradford Cox

being-yourself tired struggle

When I go on a nostalgia trip it's not aesthetic. For me it's about trying to recapture the smell or the feeling of something that I've experienced in the past personally.

Bradford Cox

smell feelings past

I don't think you should make music to make music, just to show that you can. That's the opposite of vitality.

Bradford Cox

vitality opposites thinking

I think teenagers just don't have the persistence to pretend to like something they don't anymore. I used to do that - make myself like stuff that didn't immediately appeal to me. When you're 17 and checking out John Cage records from the library. It's not like it's got the hooks of a Ramones record, or a Beach Boys record. But at the same time, you're like, I know there's something in here that I'm supposed to understand. And then eventually you find it.

Bradford Cox

teenager boys beach

I always write the first and last song of an album first, and then the middle just kind of happens.

Bradford Cox

albums writing song

I used to be a lot more engaged on an improvisational level than other people. I was always on tour and always had a guitar in my hands, and when I went back home, my battery was at full charge. I had a lot of energy to get off, just impulses that I could draw upon.

Bradford Cox

guitar home hands

As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity.

Bradford Cox

homosexual mediocrity jobs

When I do a record, it sounds more punk and raw. Or it will sound louder, or it will sound more shocking. Or mind-boggling. I'll be trying to figure it out, but once I've got it figured out I'll be like, I know this; I know where this came from. I think art is most interesting when the intention is not clear.

Bradford Cox

art interesting thinking

I think the younger kids need to realize there's this whole forgotten 90s that people don't really talk about.

Bradford Cox

kids people thinking

I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn't really want attention.

Bradford Cox

eye attention people

I'm obsessed with five different things a day. It's like lightbulbs in a Christmas light chain.

Bradford Cox

obsessed different

I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.

Bradford Cox

library interesting school

I don't know if I have any real aspirations to be an actor. It was just something I was asked to do in sort of a friend way. And I thought, Why not?

Bradford Cox

aspiration real

I don't like the sound of my own voice. And, for people I don't know, their impression of me is what they read on the internet, and they're so far off a lot of the time. I think people are intimidated by me, and I don't know why. Sometimes even my own bandmates can be intimidated, or irritated, by me. I come across as arrogant somehow. In reality, I've probably got the lowest self-esteem of anybody I know, which has really been rubbed in my face lately in personal situations.

Bradford Cox

reality people thinking

You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

Bradford Cox

musician kind trying

I was trying to write a song based on a story in a random book of Puerto Rican short stories that I found in a thrift store. I thought it was really dark, and so I tried to interpret it. I've always been interested in writing from other people's perspectives and other gender perspectives.

Bradford Cox

writing song book

All music is devotional, whether it's devotion to products, face washes, creams, plastic. Everybody is devoted to something.

Bradford Cox

devotional music-is devotion

Usually I'm not really conscious of what's going on. I don't have a lot of memories onstage. At all.

Bradford Cox

conscious memories

You gotta have friends, and it's really hard to have friends that don't operate on the same schedule as you or do the same kind of things you do, because they don't understand it. And then you realize that your friends - your real-life friends - it's not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you're doing than how you're doing.

Bradford Cox

realizing kind

Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music. And it's not a namedropping thing, but there's just not that many people in this certain small little genre world we live in that I don't know or am not acquainted with. And I like them all; I get along with pretty much everyone. It wouldn't be unusual to see a thousand collaborations at some point.

Bradford Cox

collaboration people world

A lot of Appalachian music has a certain haunted, foggy feel to it; a certain sinister quality. And that transcends who is singing it. I think it's good if an artist can represent some kind of culture that they either aspire to ignite, or that they themselves experience.