57 Quotes by Colin Meloy

The jam stuff doesn’t appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia’s songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I’m a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it’s uninteresting to me.

Meditation. That’s the key. Supposedly. Calming your mind ind total silence. Understanding your connection to the natural world and all that. You do that, and you can hear it. All the talking.

When everybody is playing at the same level, there’s so much more noise. And there’s less incentive for the people who should be rising above that noise to take time and invest in what they’re doing. It just becomes about hustling and grabbing attention.

You can’t really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness.

It’s hard for us to talk about how we disdain file-sharing when in fact it probably has been a great resource for us.

I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It’s an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

Living in war, and being a wartime band, I don’t think there’s any way that can’t somehow influence the songwriting.

There’s some things there that you just have to draw the line. Some people are just not going to like it. We would hope that everybody would like it.

That’s the beauty of things, right? People should be able to believe what they want to, follow who they want to.