66 Quotes by Win Butler

What I miss [about church] is being forced to be in community with people that aren't the same as me.

Songwriting is reliant on inspiration, which ideally you don’t have that much control over. Songs kind of half make themselves, and then you have to finish them.

My favorite English teacher in high school showed me ‘Brazil’ when I was 15 and it blew my mind. It’s one of those movies that’s revealed itself in different ways as I’ve gone back to it over the years.

Major labels just lost their way. It’s like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.

I think of hip hop as a mass media, radio, MTV thing. It’s been extremely relevant over the last 10 years and rock music is just not anymore – -a tear rolls down my cheek as I say that.

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it’s just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge.

While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it’s a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it.

I think you have to want to be really famous. It’s a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage.

I don’t think the emotional quality is the defining quality of the music but it’s definitely something that people have picked up on a lot.