Restaurants remind me of bands: there's lots of camaraderie, people work very closely together, very hard, and it's a bad job to pick if you want to make lots of money. Whether music or food, the reward always has to be because you love it.
James Murphy
A lot of the time, you compromise., which is fine - it's part of not being totally insane.
In my experience, people looking for progress aren't actually looking to move things forward. They're looking to be perceived in a certain way: as a forward thinker. It's about vanity rather than any altruistic motives for the art.
My high-techness is pretty low-tech. I'm not wildly computer savvy. I'm a record person.
If being in a band was my job, then I would quit. This is not a good job. A good job is in financial management.
DJing is really, really pleasant. It's like having people over and making hors d'oeuvres.
I like clever lyrics, funny lyrics, dumb lyrics. I can never put my finger on what I like about them.
Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.
I have a thing about inane lyrics - the world doesn't need them.
I miss producing. I hate it when I do it, but I love it.
I got a phone message from Janet Jackson saying, 'Hi, I love 'Losing My Edge', can you do me something funky and dirty like that?' I can't really do off-the-peg stuff, so I never called back.
I always wished I had a more flamboyant streak, but it's just not what I'm made of.
Making 'Sound of Silver' was very emotional at times, where I just hated making that record.
Punk rock, to me, was always outsiderness. When I first saw large-group-scene punk rock, I was repelled by it, because there were way too many people who agreed with each other.
The vast majority of kids in my school went on to college. That's just what you did. And I remember feeling like, 'No, I'm not doing that.' The idea that college was next, that it was a given, meant it was of no interest to me. So I didn't go.
I was always just blown away by David Bowie and how mannered the guy was willing to be. It was so far from what I imagined someone with my confidence to be capable of.
With a computer, you have access to so many drum sounds and samples that your snare drum will be unrelated harmonically to your kick drum.
I have a very toxic combination of being completely determined, inflexible, controlling and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone's feelings, hypersensitive to other people's needs - and it's just paralysing.
I think I'm designed to regret everything.
I don't drink beer, and I don't drink at home.
I wouldn't say I'm a friend of David Byrne, but I guess I'm an acquaintance. I'm obviously an admirer, and we've met, but we don't call and chat about 'Breaking Bad' or anything.
Those early years in New Jersey were amazing. We lived in a really small town with tons of kids my age. There were fields and woods and a creek - it was a pretty ideal place to be a little kid.
One of the big things that broke the band up for me, which I've become much clearer on over the years, was that I had no desire to be famous.
The plan is to keep on putting out records until someone shows up and tells us to stop.
Songs are songs, and to reduce them is to waste them.
I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie, and I was talking about getting the band back together. He said, 'Does it make you uncomfortable?' I said 'Yeah,', and he said, 'Good. It should. You should be uncomfortable.'
I don't prepare very well. I'm always sort of wrapped up in what I'm supposed to be doing in the moment, and then I suddenly appear someplace, and I'm really not prepared.
I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.
My personality is based on an anonymity and failure. Failure and anonymity, those are my strengths - superiority from below.
When given the opportunity to fail myself or fail someone else, I choose to fail myself.
When I want to DJ what I think to be the best-sounding place in the world, I go to this place in Sapporo, Japan, called Precious Hall, which has kind of a custom sound system with a much lower ceiling and a smaller room.
I was someone who grew up obsessed with bands, how they were and how they treated one another, and how they treated fans.
I moved to New York in 1989 and went to study at NYU.
We didn't set out to be cool. We set out to be an extremely tight band. We wanted to defy expectations. The more negative your mindset on coming to one of our gigs, the better for us, frankly.
I'm an underdog by nature, and I like to be fighting. I don't make music for myself. I make music to fight.
I was a singing guitar player as a kid, and I found it really embarrassing, so I stopped singing and became a drummer.
Even in the band I was in when I was a kid, I'd be telling everyone what to do. I'd be leaning over the drums, telling them to tune their guitars, micromanaging.
As things mature - whether they be real estate, rock n' roll, politics, festivals, radio - there's an efficiency that develops, and with it, very often, comes some soul-crushing truths.
I love rock. I love the music that was born out of the latter part of the 20th century. It means a lot to me.
To do a band properly does kind of mean you don't really get to do anything else.
I'm not a big songwriter guy. People who are really good singer-songwriters usually left me kind of cold.
I started playing in my first band when I was 12. I like to date myself by saying I was in a New Age band when it wasn't ironic; it was actually called new wave because it was new.
I never did albums fully at DFA; I always would go someplace else so I wasn't making a record in my office, basically.
What we are as a live band is different to what we are on recordings, but they're both equal versions: they're both LCD Soundsystem, but in very different ways.
Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.
My gut instincts are strong, but they're not always accessible to me, which is why I like DJing, because you don't have time, and you have to go on instinct.
I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.
I was into punk rock my whole life. I never listened to the Eagles. I never listened to things that were getting Grammys. So getting a Grammy nomination wasn't bad, it just wasn't meaningful.
I'm always surprised by how optimistic and open sometimes people who are very successful are.
There's kind of a limitless amount of things I want to do, and when the path seems to open, that's when I try to do a thing.
