Guitarists From The United States

"Pancho was a bandit boys His horse was fast as polished steel Wore his gun outside his pants For all the honest world to feel Pancho met his match you know On the deserts down in Mexico Nobody heard his dying words That's the way it goes All the Federales say They could have had him any day They only let him hang around Out of kindness I suppose"

"If I needed you, would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain? If you needed me, I would come to you I'd swim the seas for to ease your pain Well, in the night forlorn, oh, the morning's born And the morning shines with the lights of love And you will miss sunrise if you close your eyes And that would break my heart in two The lady's with me now since I showed her how To lay her lily hand in mine Loop and Lil agree, she's a sight to see A treasure for the poor to find"

"Days, up and down they come Like rain on a conga drum Forget most, remember some But don't turn none away Everything is not enough And nothin' is too much to bear Where you been is good and gone All you keep is the getting there To live is to fly Low and high So shake the dust off of your wings And the sleep out of your eyes"

"You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money.... You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar."

"Dude. You are marrying Zooey Deschanel. You have nothing, I repeat, nothing to be sad about anymore. From here on out, please only songs about emotional guys and their blind luck."

"An ex-girlfriend once got upset when I told her that music is the most important thing in my life. It’s more important than anyone else could ever be. I don’t want to be overly dramatic and say it’s the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go. As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I’ve always been able to rely on. So why wouldn’t it be the most important thing in my life?"

"Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can’t stand us, and people who absolutely can’t live without us. I’d rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent."

"I don’t spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself — and if other people like it, that’s great."

"At this point in my life, I find myself obsessed with alternate paths I could’ve taken. I don’t think about this with a sense of regret, but with a sense of wonder..."

"A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind."

"I decided a handful of years ago that I just want to write songs that you can understand as soon as you put the record on. There’s no need to veil what’s happening in the song the way I used to. My goal as a songwriter now is to simply write some memorable turns of phrase."

"It’s amazing to have people singing a song back to you on a stage. It’s great to finish recording a song and play it for your friend, and they love it. That feels good. But nothing feels better than when you’ve finished something and you know it’s good, and you know that those other responses will come in time."

"Some fans get genuinely upset if I admit that a song that they held close to their heart was not based on actual events in my life. Like “What Sarah Said”: I was never in a waiting room in a hospital waiting for news that somebody was going to die."

"I find it very hard to accept the wonderful things in my life. My life really is great: I do exactly what I want to do for a living, I have a wonderful person to share my life with, I have a great family, I have great friends. But somehow there’s a void. I’m the last person who should be complaining or wondering why I’m perpetually unhappy. I would like to think that my lack of contentment is part of what makes my work the way it is, and for the better. I would rather make great records than make great relationships. When I’m at odds with myself, I would rather fuck up every relationship I’ve ever been in and write great records. And not because I need a breakup to provide me with material. Not like that."

"Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones, I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me."

"At some point I thought that, as I got older, I’d come to terms with a lot of things. I’d solve some big problems, and eventually I’d become content. It’s almost more depressing to think that the older you get, the more your problems multiply. When I’m old, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not really do anything — just be happy to exist. I’d like to look at my accomplishments and sit back and revel in my own achievement. But I don’t think that’ll ever happen. Before I made a living playing music, I used to work shitty job after shitty job and think “Man, as soon as I’m able to make a living in music, it’s really going to come together then, it’s really going be amazing.” I remember hoping there’d be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don’t want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show. I remember what it was like, and it was shitty."

"Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting."

"It’s hard enough having a relationship with one person, but to have a relationship with three other bandmates that you are so intimately tied to and you spend so much time with — and to have that actually work and function — is just astounding. I have been in a band for more than 10 years now. I never thought I’d be doing anything for 10 years straight, let alone a band, and I feel so fortunate for that. I have been allowed for some reason to do that. But it’s even more amazing that we get along better now than we did 10 years ago."

"I once knew a girl In the years of my youth With eyes like the summer All beauty and truth In the morning I fled Left a note and it read Someday you will be loved."

"You'll be loved you'll be loved Like you never have known The memories of me Will seem more like bad dreams Just a series of blurs Like I never occurred Someday you will be loved"

"How I wish you could see the potential The potential of you and me It's like a book elegantly bound, but In a language that you can't read just yet You got to spend some time, love You got to spend some time with me And I know that you'll find love I will possess your heart"

"If there's no one beside you When your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark"

"Our Youth is fleeting Old age is just around the bend And I can't wait to go grey And I'll sit and wonder Of every love that could have been If I'd only thought of something charming to say"

"You touch her skin And then you think That she is beautiful But she don't mean a thing to me"

"And tiny vessels oozed into your neck And formed the bruises That you said you didn't want to fade But they did and so did I that day"

"As the flashbulbs burst she holds a smile Like someone would hold a crying child Soon everybody will ask what became of you Your heart was dying fast and you didn't know what to do."

"It wasn't quite what is seemed: a lack of pleasantries (My able body isn't what it used to be) I must admit I was charmed by your advances Your advantage left me helplessly into you"

"I wish the world was flat like the old days Then i could travel just by folding a map No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways There'd be no distance that could hold us back"

"I am waiting for something to go wrong I am waiting for familiar resolve"

"I feel like there's a lot of beauty in the darkness of Narrow Stairs, but that's not really a place I'm ready to go to for a while. I'm interested in taking a different approach and having the next record be different in tone — I'm just not interested in making another dark, dark album."

"It seems that you live in someone else's dream In a hand-me-down wedding dress With the things that could have been are repressed But you said your vows and you closed the door On so many men who would have loved you more"

"I don't think there's necessarily a story, but there's definitely a theme here. One of my favorite kind of dark jokes is, "How do you make God laugh? You make a plan." Nobody ever makes a plan that they're gonna go out and get hit by a car. A plan almost always has a happy ending. Essentially, every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time. I really like the idea of a plan not being seen as having definite outcomes, but more like little wishes."

"And it's strange They are basically the same So i don't ask names anymore"

"I pulled On The Road off the shelf and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, “That’s the way, that’s the ideal life, that’s great. You get in a car and you drive and you see your friends and you end up in a city for a night and you go out drinking and you catch up and you share these really intense experiences. And then you’re on the road and you’re doing it again.” The romance of the road, particularly from Kerouac’s work, encapsulated how I wanted to live. I found a way to do it by being a musician, which is what I always wanted to be. The traveling and the being on tour and being away from home set a precedent for me where I thought, “Oh yeah, this is how it works.” But then in reading Big Sur, it’s the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That’s the potential other end of the spectrum when you’re never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me because I have made the decision to live like this."

"If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that’s all you read, like you don’t know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes — his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life."

"I want to be alone. I need to touch each stone, face the grave that I have grown. I want to be alone."

"Phish in San Diego...I saw them play an unbelievable fucking show, which, I can honestly say, changed my life. I was physically torn apart and spiritually moved by the experience."

"Catch a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain. Wherever I have gone, wherever I've been and gone, wherever I have gone... The blues are all the same."

"When I'm not drinkin' baby, you are on my mind. When I'm not sleeping baby, when I'm not sleeping mama, when I'm not sleeping, you know you'll find me cryin'"

"George Bush is just as much in the dark as I am, and it scares me."

"I have a very young brother and sister, and if you can get a kid singing the words to a song after they heard it for the first time, it's a hit.""

"Well there are walls, that make a prison, many names that can bring hate. You tear 'em down and ride 'em over."

"Tiffani-Amber Thiessen thought we were all on blow....Tori Spelling hung out with us backstage and gave us the lowdown. Brian Austin Green, kept telling us about his music. Ian Ziering was kind of a dick. Maybe he was having a bad day."

"Don't look back, over your shoulder! Keep your eye on freedom shore! Because you know the brave man with you, also pays for the wages of war."

"[The Decemberists] generally manage to encompass the Stones, XTC, Morrissey and me without sounding like any of them. It takes a boy from Montana to be that British."

"Well, I think you just have to be prepared to be weirder and weirder. I follow the example of Robyn Hitchcock who, I think, has created a career out of this world he has constructed. It’s very much his world, and he continually builds upon it. I think he’s received criticism in the past along the lines of, “Oh, here’s another Robyn Hitchcock record about flesh and fish,” and things like that, but in fact if you really look at the songs, they’re just the building blocks for this very complex, very vibrant, and very real world that exists within his songwriting. So I look to him for inspiration."

"Well, I think it is accidental. It’s just something I started doing naturally and it had a lot to do with reading. I think that Dylan Thomas, his prose and poetry, was a big influence on me. Just his use of words… He would use so many odd words: like these three- and four-syllable words that you just don’t normally hear. And they’re not used in a manner that sets the text apart from the reader. Rather they’re drawing the reader in. It’s entirely based on the alliteration of the word itself—onomatopoeia and things like that. I feel like a lot of the words I use don’t stick out in the song because they keep the feel of the song in mind. The rhythm—that’s the primary thing. They’re put in there for rhythm and alliteration as much as they are for meaning. And as long as they are not used extraneously, they’re real lightning rods for people listening to the lyrics. If the words are really helping out the rhythm of the song then all they’re going to do is draw the listener in even more"

"All instruments sound fantastic in a church."

"My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris Smuggling bombs for the underground. And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence; He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis."

"A little bit of both. 'Decembrist' is the accepted English translation of the Russian 'Dekabristy.' We appropriated it by adding the extra E, which, in my opinion, made it a better band name. For whatever reason."