Jeff Mangum quotes
-
“And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Song: "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"". 1998.
-
“I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Mike McGonigal, pitchfork.com. December 21, 1997.
-
“Soft silly music is meaningful, magical.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Song: "Oh Comely" ("In the Aeroplane Over the Sea")". February 10, 1998.
-
“How strange it is to be anything at all”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Song: 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea'". 1997.
-
-
“God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Song: 'Two-Headed Boy Part Two'". 1998.
-
“The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Mike McGonigal, pitchfork.com. February 11, 2008.
-
“You know, you struggle and cry and moan and thrash around and beat your head against the wall... and then you realize that you're just yourself, and you come to terms with yourself struggling. There are some serious, serious things to deal with in terms of the immensity of the suffering that we humans create for ourselves and for the world around us.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Mike McGonigal, pitchfork.com. February 11, 2008.
-
-
“I'm trying to find peace in the world, as it is. I'm feeling this sort of slow stripping of my mind, like the layers of an onion. I'm starting to see through all these little structures that have been imposed on me by my society that tell me how I'm supposed to view my life and the world. What I'm supposed to find to be important and what is not. Sometimes you see through so much of it that you feel like you're just a leaf blowing on the wind.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“I do feel like it's so important not to take that for granted - that opportunity to share your ideas with intelligent, beautiful people.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“We can see an anthill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an anthill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them - creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic that is inherent in all of these things already.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“We consider the animals to be lower, and to me, that makes no sense at all. If you look at a tree or a mushroom or a squirrel, it's perfectly in tune with itself. It has no problem being exactly what it is, and it does what it's meant to do without any complaints or problems. Because we create all these problems in being, we think we're somehow higher than the animals. But it's we humans who have a difficult time even caring for our children, or anything.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
-
“I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one, and then it's about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It's funny how you create something and you think you're going in a million different directions, and then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life, but you're just as surprised by it as anybody else.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“When so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain... I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can't just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Marci Fierman, pitchfork.com. February 1, 2002.
-
-
“Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it's not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“The music is supposed to be healing.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“Often, everywhere we look, we seem to find obstacles and facades and smokescreens, so it was really nice to find things in the world that actually spoke to me. And I felt like Eastern thought really spoke to me. Because it isn't trying to cover up the pain in life; it's trying to deal with it and overcome it in an intelligent way. I think the reason I love Eastern thought so much, and mysticism in general - but especially Buddhism - is because it seems to me an attempt to look life squarely in the face, as it is.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“Typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything comes together in the song.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
-
“I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“I decided at 10 I wanted to be in a band; everyone else wanted to play football.”
-- Jeff Mangum -
“I feel like we're so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to love... everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents... As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I'm a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
“For me, there's a lot of intrinsic mystery and power in folk music, but a lot of people don't perceive that music from around the world as something that fits into their lives or their psyche in any way. So I tried to present it in a different way to give it more of a chance to sink into people's heads.”
-- Jeff MangumSource : Source: pitchfork.com
-
You may also like:
-
Anne Frank
Author -
Daniel Johnston
Singer-songwriter -
Guy Picciotto
Singer -
Mike D
Drums -
Astra Taylor
Filmmaker