It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?"

Paul Banks

Categorized in : Thinking Taken Misunderstood

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginati... by Paul Banks

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative

broken-hearted hearted broken

If time is my vessel, then learning to love might be my way back... by Paul Banks

If time is my vessel, then learning to love might be my way back to sea

sea might way

You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.

unconscious careers ideas

In an artistic and spiritual sense I'm really not that concerned about what happens after the album is done.

albums done spiritual

If you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are.

style artist essence

...It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.

crush writing trying

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.

guitar player writing

That's for non-musicians to say: "I only listen to this or that type of music." I think musicians love all music, or at least that's my case.

type musician thinking

If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.

cubicles chess-game games

Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.

personality littles art

I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective.

confusing perspective people

I perceive everything to be constantly subjective and strange. My version of truth in what I express, it feels like that opaque quality that you're talking about. It's just me being legitimate.

opaque quality talking

Basically, every band that makes it has some dude with some sense of business. I don't know if our band would've been so successful were it not for Daniel's [Kessler] insight into how things really work. Daniel was the one who was diligently saying, "We should make a demo, send it out, play shows but not too many shows, get on shows with touring bands that are coming to New York."

successful new-york play

The idea of starting a band because of Nirvana and thereby trying to sound like Nirvana is totally not the case.

sound trying ideas

I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.

care long people

When I say I had a cosmic confidence that we were capable of writing good music, I'm speaking about that time when we met Sam [Fogarino]. Greg [ex-drummer] is actually a really great drummer and a great guy. I never want to sound like I am belittling his contributions in the early days, but when Sam joined, there was an immediacy of, like, "Here we go."

guy sound writing

I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

finishing house school

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana. by Paul Banks

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.

band sound wanted

My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail.

rocks hip-hop tails

Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.

absurdity agree thinking