I sat out a few years because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.

I did that Grammys thing – I did a little freeform poem.

We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they’re like, I don’t know about this one.

There’s some quality you get when you’re not totally comfortable. When you’re not doing what you’re used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.

I had long hair when I was a teenager.

In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs.

In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I’m not technically a rapper, whatever that means.

Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I’m writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

If someone is making a judgment when they don’t have firsthand experience, it’s intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don’t know about?

In the studio, I’m always throwing people on different instruments.

The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.

When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.

Every time you go in, it’s like starting over. You don’t know how you did the other records. You’re learning all over. It’s some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

I hadn’t done much rapping in a while. I really wasn’t sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn’t really required of me.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people’s entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.

There’s never any pressure on the music having to be something.

I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It’s At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.

Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side.

I would love to do an electronic record. There’s just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by.

There’s 40 or 50 songs that nobody’s heard that I’ve done in between albums. There’s a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that’s never been released.

It’s really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out.

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

I think my whole generation’s mission is to kill the cliche.

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

I didn’t want to do something typical.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

I sat out a few years because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.

Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.

I’m just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it’s not usually on purpose.

I’m the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don’t have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have – a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There’s shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That’s why I pay no mind.

When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You’re hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There’s only so much you can do with one record.