“I’ve kept most of my friends for decades, and I continue to make new friends.”
― John Grant
“I’m angry because I was so scared for so many years about just being myself.”
― John Grant
“My mother was a very sweet soul and a beautiful person, but she had a lot of fear.”
― John Grant
“I spend a lot of my time just looking at words and grammar and writing things down that I don’t know.”
― John Grant
“I love a lot of different styles, but my heart belongs in electronic music.”
― John Grant
“I can’t create music if I’m wearing a mask and not being myself, and that was the problem with The Czars.”
― John Grant
“Do you know the solo at the end of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Any More?’ that sounds like a chainsaw breaking through? That is what I can’t do with my voice. That’s when you hear how painful this has been to me.”
― John Grant
“I overthink everything.”
― John Grant
“I’m not saying that I don’t have skills. I’m saying I don’t feel like I can use my skills to achieve self-esteem. I feel like it’s cheating. I think that I should have self-esteem simply because I am a human being who deserves love and deserves everything just as much or just as little as everyone else.”
― John Grant
“I don’t really listen to my old music.”
― John Grant
“I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.”
― John Grant
“For me, every single thing I do seems to be about the process of letting go because that’s what I so desperately need to do with so many things: with fear, with what people think of me, and all these things I’ve worried about my whole life.”
― John Grant
“People have always painted me like a pessimist, like somebody who sees the glass half-empty. But I think the fact that I keep showing up and saying, ‘No, there must be a way for me to live in this world,’ that shows I’m an eternal optimist.”
― John Grant
“In order to not have to deal with being gay in the world, you have to control everything. You try and walk in an un-gay way so as not to be found out. You try to control every situation, check the people around you, that you’re not in the wrong place, and that can be exhausting. It goes on for decades, and it becomes mental sickness.”
― John Grant
“When I reached my senior year in high school, I fell into a hole that took a couple of decades to get out of.”
― John Grant
“Becoming a musician was all about escape. It was about getting away from the foulness that was me.”
― John Grant
“That inner narrative – the desire to understand the way I am – never really switches off.”
― John Grant
“I know I’m likeable, but living with me is different. Yes, I can be charming. That desire to please people and learning what to do to charm their socks off is something many of us do. But you get into a relationship, and the party’s over at some point. They see the real you.”
― John Grant
“The first 20 years had such a profound effect on me, I spent the next 20 dealing with them.”
― John Grant
“Reykjavik has a mixture of southern and northern mentality. There’s a laid-back, relaxed attitude but also the feeling things are going to get done.”
― John Grant
“Icelanders love to speak English. Their English is a joy to hear because of how colloquial and idiomatic it is, but they appreciate your efforts with Icelandic.”
― John Grant
“Being in school, whenever I laughed or smiled, I would turn to find someone staring at me with this terrible hatred and disgust. I had to control everything – control my voice, control my facial expressions, control my hair and my clothes, and where I walked and where I sat – at every moment. I think that drove me to terrible anxiety.”
― John Grant
“The most horrifying thing I ever did was work as a steward on an airplane. I wanted to get hired by United. I thought, ‘With my languages, this will be amazing; I will work in First Class.’ But I could only get a job with an airline going from Newark, New Jersey to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”
― John Grant
“I do feel I have a hard time dealing with things being OK.”
― John Grant
“I’m quite gregarious. But when it comes to relationships, I mean, I’m no good at it. I suck at it. And people say I’m way too hard on myself, but I always feel like somebody else is going to say it if I don’t. Why not just beat them to the punch so it doesn’t hurt so much?”
― John Grant
“I just feel like this guy who’s visiting the music business over the weekend. Every time I write a song, I feel like it’s never going to happen again.”
― John Grant
“I grew up singing in a church choir.”
― John Grant
“I could probably use some tips from a vocal trainer or something about breathing, but we all know it’s not about technical prowess.”
― John Grant
“When I got into languages, I needed to amass things to make myself more palatable or more acceptable as a human.”
― John Grant
“The snappier lyrics come when I’m feeling really good and up. A lot of times, they come after I’ve just had a meeting with somebody that was uplifting, and you get home, and you’re feeling playful or upbeat or whatever, and then they just seem to pop right out.”
― John Grant
“My music is definitely very personal. The songs are about moments, snapshots of everyday life, and about having one’s say, or at least feeling like one has had one’s say.”
― John Grant
“When I was young, people were so disgusted by me. Before I even knew that I was gay… everybody else had it figured out and, you know, they were letting you know.”
― John Grant
“I just felt that I was going to fall apart if I didn’t learn to be myself.”
― John Grant
“I think the thing that I find the most difficult to talk about is religion.”
― John Grant
“I could have easily said that I don’t believe in anything when I came out of the upbringing that I had, but I do still believe that there is something there, and I have a difficult time figuring it out. I suppose I don’t want to be thought of as stupid or unintelligent because I believe that there’s something out there bigger than us in the world.”
― John Grant
“I’m a seriously flawed individual, but I guess everybody is.”
― John Grant
“I was so ashamed of who I was. And I also felt like an outcast in gay society as well because I wasn’t good-looking enough; my body wasn’t good enough.”
― John Grant
“I would love to be part of a community.”
― John Grant
“In my family, I was loved, but only if I would fight this gay thing and not let it take over me. I would be loved unconditionally if I could be cured of my ‘sickness,’ but it certainly would not be OK if I couldn’t.”
― John Grant
“I think The Czars had an identity crisis, as we were five guys pulling in different musical directions.”
― John Grant
“I felt like a failure for so long because I wasn’t able to access myself in the way I knew I would have if I was going to make music that mattered. I knew I was going to have to learn how to be honest.”
― John Grant
“I realized that a lot of the things I had been telling myself about not being good enough just weren’t true, and ‘Queen of Denmark’ gave me the chance to prove to myself that I could do something real.”
― John Grant
“It really was an amazing thing when Midlake brought me down to Texas and created an atmosphere in which I felt really safe and was able to do whatever I wanted artistically.”
― John Grant
“It took me a long time to find my own voice, even after I started making my own music.”
― John Grant
“I still deal with triggers and neuroses that I’ve developed over the decades. But I do think I have a great amount of compassion for people who feel that they don’t fit in, or people who feel they have trouble finding their place in this world.”
― John Grant
“Part of what I do, after feeling invisible for a long time, is make an effort not to be invisible any more.”
― John Grant
“I have trouble with things like Facebook. It presents such a warped vision. I get sick of people’s opinions about every little thing and this warped view that everyone is as happy as a pig in garbage.”
― John Grant
“I don’t let the computer into my bedroom. It would get in the way of life, sleep. And I really can’t let that happen.”
― John Grant
“I can’t allow myself to censor myself.”
― John Grant
“Me becoming a person, instead of somebody who just hides and is afraid, has happened in tandem with me learning to write music and become a good songwriter.”
― John Grant
“I love that phrase that parents say to their children when they cry: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about.’”
― John Grant
“I don’t really experience much embarrassment.”
― John Grant
“I believe humans have a soul that continues to exist after they die, but I don’t know what form that will take.”
― John Grant
“I think I have a great voice, but it’s not special enough to be remembered. But what’s special about me is much more than just my voice.”
― John Grant
“The rejection I received when I was young for being a homosexual… that’s nothing compared to the number you do on yourself when you’ve been taught that you are not a human like other people.”
― John Grant
“I love patchwork quilts. But not in music.”
― John Grant
“I really do feel like music is the only thing that I can do.”
― John Grant
“I’m not a big punk fan, but I love a good, solid screamer.”
― John Grant
“If I had a good scream, like Frank Black, I’d be doing punk music, ‘cos I love that.”
― John Grant
“If ‘Queen Of Denmark’ was about my childhood, then ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ is definitely about my adolescence, and that period was completely dominated by electronic music.”
― John Grant
“’Ernest Borgnine’ is sort of my version of Woody Allen’s ‘Purple Rose Of Cairo’ in that it’s about the occasional difficulty of coming to terms with the cold hard facts and the temptation to escape into another world – like movies, for example. I’m a pro at escaping.”
― John Grant
“I don’t know about the totally happy album, though. I don’t know if that will ever come from me.”
― John Grant
“I seem to be very attracted to strong female personalities in acting and music.”
― John Grant
“It’s always been my goal to have backing singers.”
― John Grant
“I think the humor, when applied in the right amount, only serves to intensify the other emotions in a given song; it highlights them, makes them stand out.”
― John Grant
“Sometimes I wish I was one of those artists like David Bowie. They’re not putting their private lives out there; it’s about show and entertainment. But an alter ego is very dangerous for me. Because I am the guy who will become lost in that.”
― John Grant
“I don’t want to leave the house, and I don’t want to settle down.”
― John Grant
“I feel uncomfortable when I think about my father listening to my records, because I don’t want to hurt him.”
― John Grant
“I feel like, every single decision I make and every single album I make, it’s all about letting go. Letting go of the past and just getting on with it.”
― John Grant
“The thing is I don’t feel like my story is special. I don’t feel like it’s different to anybody else.”
― John Grant
“The only difficult thing is learning to recognise the interesting bits from those millions of moments life provides you with every day and writing down those snippets.”
― John Grant
“If I’m honest, I suppose there’s something I don’t want people to see in my eyes. They really are the window to the soul.”
― John Grant
“Most of the bad things that have happened to me happened in Denver.”
― John Grant
“I loved the whole New Romantic, New Wave thing… New Order, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Blancmange, Yazoo.”
― John Grant
“There’s an incredible amount of pain involved in being a human, but this humorous stuff is essential in overcoming it.”
― John Grant
“Being embraced by the British people is a beautiful compliment for me. It feels very special.”
― John Grant
“The lion’s share of what I listened to in the Eighties, what really affected me, was coming from Britain.”
― John Grant
“I have to strip away all the layers when I’m writing the song. I have to cut through all these layers of years of putting up walls and putting protective layers around myself.”
― John Grant
“I feel like, in the Czars, for example, I was afraid. I couldn’t express myself. I didn’t have a connection to myself. That’s one of the huge reasons why it was such a difficult existence. I put a lot of that on myself. I couldn’t access myself. I couldn’t look at myself, because I was too ashamed.”
― John Grant
“When I write my songs, I’m writing about the pain, the joy, and the ridiculousness of being a human.”
― John Grant
“I don’t feel like I’m writing music for gay people. I’m a gay man who is writing music about one tiny little experience of what it’s like to be a human on this planet.”
― John Grant
“I come from a position where it seems like I have an addictive quality to everything in my life.”
― John Grant
“I’ve kept going to therapy to find out why my perspective is so skewered and why I’m filled with rage. It’s so I can live in this world alongside these other people who seem to be what is desired and what the world wants.”
― John Grant
“The lead character in ‘Adaptation’ is pretty much me but with more talent. Every time I watch ‘Adaptation,’ I feel very emotional because it makes me be kinder to myself and see the human situation a little more clearly.”
― John Grant
“You can only be you, and there are plenty of people out there who wouldn’t have you be any other way.”
― John Grant
“I’m very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.”
― John Grant
“I spent many years trying to fit in and do things the way I thought I was supposed to – trying to be perceived the way I thought people wanted to see me. I grew up in a very religious household and wasn’t taught to feel comfortable or good about my sexuality, so it feels great to be able to say things the way I want to say them.”
― John Grant
“It’s not like we wanted to talk about the fact that we’re gay all the time, but the world has forced it to be an issue.”
― John Grant
“I had never considered myself a political guy, but there are certain things I can’t shut up about. When I hear people say things like, ‘If ‘we’ allow gays to marry, then people will want to marry animals and children,’ I can’t just stand there.”
― John Grant
“There’s a lot of anger in ‘Queen of Denmark,’ and that’s me getting political.”
― John Grant
“Madeline Kahn is one of my favourite people in the entire world and one of the funniest. She was a talented Broadway star and also sang opera.”
― John Grant
“When I came out, I found I hadn’t been born with the right genes. It’s quite brutal. If you’re beautiful and you have the right genes, then the gay scene is a place where you can be worshipped. But if you don’t, it’s a different ball of wax.”
― John Grant
“I can only live in the world of truth, inasmuch as I’m able to be truthful with myself at any given point, on any given day.”
― John Grant
“The 1980s were all about synths for me, and it never went away after that.”
― John Grant
“I don’t cry easily.”
― John Grant
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