Zach Condon Quotes

It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'

The more I know, the more I realise I don't know. And the more I realise I'll never truly understand.

You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that's really vague, but it's true.

Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.

I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.

I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.

I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.

I think, if I had my choice, I would spend all my time in the studio writing, and creating music.

After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there's this new generation of voices that are really starting to burst through the seams.

I try to shut my brain down as much as possible. And let the melodies flow, if possible.

It's a natural tendency of mine to not even listen to lyrics.

When I came back to America, I realized that world music is no joke, it really has a lot to it.

I dropped out of high school and I tried to go to community college for a little while. I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.

I put myself in the studio and I really made sure to say, 'Well, if I would normally reach for a trumpet, why don't I reach for the next nearest instrument instead?'

My thought with harmonies and melodies in general, is that if it doesn't come right away then it's never going to come at all.

I like to think that location, travel, etc, is a launching point for purely imagining.

I spent my entire life working with the smallest budget I could get. Just working with old, junky, donated equipment. The only things I bought myself were the trumpet and the $9 ukulele.

I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.

You can never not feel like that, as a working artist these days. It's funny - time off makes me nervous, but so does time on. At least the pressure wasn't coming from outside.

I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.

It feels much more natural to move forward and grow with the instruments I've grown accustomed to. Piano, accordion, brass, ukulele.

I'm swept along by larger forces out of my control.

When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

It's just not an image I had ever put out about myself - the bedroom synth guy. The whole thing seemed ridiculous.

In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin.

In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's worth owning.

I love the community and the entertainment too much. I'm used to it - it's what I saw first.

I was always looking outside of myself for stories and ideas and influences and then I kind of realized in 2010, that all of this time, I've developed a "sound." And I've never fully explored it.

I can't work in Brooklyn. Unless I'm completely locked away in a studio, there's just too much distraction and stimulation.

I think that within the world of music that we work in, which is so not perfect, I think that you really do have to learn to accept your own mistakes as part of the beauty of music itself.

I just reached the point where I realised, I need to stop repeating myself if I'm ever actually going to enjoy the music I'm creating.

As much as I try to grow as a lyricist, I tend to laugh at even calling myself that, because I think that my actual talents lie more in arrangements than they do words.

There was always a unique Beirut sound, it was always there, and so this time I just dove straight into that, instead of daydreaming and wandering.

Often when I find myself listening to music, at least 60 to 70% of it is foreign, so I don't understand a word of it. Melody to me will always be a million times more important than words.