Please Quote Me: Jay Reatard

We just launched a new website dedicated to collecting quotes about the creative process. It’s called Please Quote Me, and you can find out more about it here.

One of the inspirations for launching that site was a scene from the documentary about Jay Reatard, Better Than Something, where Jay talks about how, growing up, he learned about new music by reading interviews with his favorite bands. If anyone in the interview mentioned another band that he’d never heard, Jay would immediately go out and buy their record.

We realized that there’s no place on the internet that organizes information about artists in this way—a rabbit hole of creative wisdom.

So we built it, and in honor of Jay, we’re launching Please Quote Me with Jay Reatard as our first round-up of quotes. You can check out all of the Jay Reatard quotes we’ve compiled over at Please Quote Me. Please sign up and add more if you’re so inclined.

Here are a few of our favorites:

"I’m far from a poet, I never really dug Bob Dylan so I don’t approach writing lyrics from that style. Sometimes it’s as simple, in pop music, as finding something that rhymes. I’m aware that certain words sound more musical and what not. I started to use things that sound rhythmic and melodic at the same time. That’s about all I think about when I sing songs, 'How do these words sound?' more than 'What do they mean?'"

"Gonna turn into Brian Wilson, and I’m gonna have to get a fucking sandbox built in my bedroom or something. I’m the most inspired when something completely destroys me to the point where I’m bedridden, depressed and feeling completely self-loathing and hating myself. The moment when I can finally get enough energy to get up, that’s when I find that songs really start coming. And after I finish writing the songs, that’s such a feeling of release, that I’ve accomplished something, that I get happy and want to leave."

"That youthful idea that everything’s going to be alright, that I’m going to be someone’s Prince Charming and ride off into the sunset. It’s just apparent to me how things aren’t that easy; they don’t work that way. I think I’m disillusioned a bit, with the world. Hopefully I don’t follow in their footsteps and go into that odd, 1981 'I did too much coke, can’t make a decent song to save my life' phase, but I’ve still got a decent amount of time to figure that one out too [laughs]."

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