Top 89 Julia Holter Quotes December 10, 2020 by Krista Aniston Leave a Comment “Amidst all the internal and external babble we experience daily, it’s hard to find one’s foundation.”― Julia Holter“I’m happy that I worked alone on ‘Tragedy,’ but it’s obvious that I was trying to create something much bigger than I could do on my own.”― Julia Holter“To me, the process of art is very much a process of translation, of borrowing.”― Julia Holter“If you’ve ever seen paparazzi go after a celebrity, it’s really freaky.”― Julia Holter“I really like being home. I like being comfortable, and I’m not a very dramatic person.”― Julia Holter“I don’t often meet with strangers and feel okay about collaborating with them.”― Julia Holter“One of the struggles that I have with classical music is the way one thinks about a recapitulation. There’s always this idea of themes, and I have trouble with that.”― Julia Holter“The classic problem in a relationship is a person trying to control the other person. People just want to conquer somebody.”― Julia Holter“I played cello on my early recordings, but that doesn’t mean I’m a cellist, you know?”― Julia Holter“I started classical piano when I was eight, but I wasn’t a virtuoso. I just really liked it.”― Julia Holter“It’s nice to work with people who know how to mic drums right and how to record properly. But there’s something to be said for doing it yourself.”― Julia Holter“I grew up watching ‘Gigi.’ My grandmother had it, and I watched it there.”― Julia Holter“I think of each record as different and not having very much in common with what went before or what comes next.”― Julia Holter“I usually work in a room which is totally cluttered with my mess, and there’s stuff everywhere, and it’s kind of chaotic because I am a very messy person. I could totally write in a pristine environment, but it would mean I would have to be at someone else’s house.”― Julia Holter“I often find that I like the vibe of not having technology around me.”― Julia Holter“When I was a kid, I had a xylophone, and I thought that was the instrument I wanted to play. I didn’t realize it was a toy.”― Julia Holter“I see myself as a songwriter and a poet.”― Julia Holter“What was special about Leonard Cohen’s work was its calm mystery.”― Julia Holter“I love ’80s beats; everyone does.”― Julia Holter“You don’t have to know about ‘Hippolytus’ to listen to ‘Tragedy.’”― Julia Holter“One thing I do like about L.A. is the fact that you can be – whether you’re famous or it’s just a matter of, like, seeing people you know all the time on the street, you can be pretty anonymous and walk around and, like, not run into people, because it’s such a big city and because a lot of people drive.”― Julia Holter“I’m inspired by nonmusical things a lot, whether it’s a film or a book or whatever.”― Julia Holter“No one recognises me on the street, ever.”― Julia Holter“You can have an Internet presence, but it doesn’t mean anyone has any idea who you are or what you look like. Which is great.”― Julia Holter“I don’t like to talk too much about my music; I like people to just experience it and not worry what I have to say.”― Julia Holter“There’s definitely been a focus on the literary aspects of my music, and I always get a little cringey because I don’t feel like I’m particularly literary. There’s a sort of academic label that’s put on me that seems inaccurate.”― Julia Holter“It’s so hard to know where you belong, ever. You have to be yourself and let yourself fall wherever you fall.”― Julia Holter“I’m not, like, always focused; I’m very unfocused. I’m reading, and then I’m looking at my phone, and then I’m on the Internet.”― Julia Holter“I do have a big problem with the idea of music as a form of communication unless it’s political – and that’s where it’s tricky because a lot of music is political, even if it’s not overtly so. But my music isn’t that; it’s about a feeling.”― Julia Holter“Green tea is my main source of caffeine, so I drink it every day.”― Julia Holter“One thing that’s really important to me in my music is mystery.”― Julia Holter“I did study with Anne Carson briefly in Michigan. She taught there, and that’s where I first encountered her, in her class.”― Julia Holter“I like mantras and repeating things, like in pop music, where you repeat a line over and over again. It’s just so beautiful.”― Julia Holter“’Have You in My Wilderness,’ the title track, is about the idea of possessing a person, or saying, ‘You’re mine; you’re in my world now.’ I was drawn to that as an idea less from my own experience than from listening to music written by men that was kind of male gaze-y.”― Julia Holter“I basically just write stream of consciousness to a certain extent. I let the song kind of go where it wants to go.”― Julia Holter“Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation – these kinds of things I find oppressive.”― Julia Holter“I’m not an unhappy person – I’m just an anxious person. It runs in the family.”― Julia Holter“Most records are usually not united by one specific story, but that seems to be something that I like and that I find easy to do.”― Julia Holter“All I ever know is what I want to do next.”― Julia Holter“It’s hard for me to get shows in the U.S. It’s that simple. I don’t know what that means. I think it means there’s not as much support here for my music?”― Julia Holter“I usually like to hide my vocals behind the music. I don’t like to hide them consciously, but I have a tendency to prefer the vocal at the same level as everything else and put lots of reverb on it.”― Julia Holter“In high school, I would secretly play Joni Mitchell songs all the time. That’s when I started singing and playing at the same time, and I got really into doing that.”― Julia Holter“If I feel like I’m myself, then I’m very uncomfortable.”― Julia Holter“I’ve never felt at home anywhere.”― Julia Holter“I don’t thrive in a school or academic environment, I found out. I thrive better in the world outside the small academy because I find it hard to explain what I’m doing.”― Julia Holter“Putting my audience to sleep isn’t what I’m going for.”― Julia Holter“In L.A., you can play forever, and no one around the world will hear you.”― Julia Holter“I started writing music as a composer in school, in the classical tradition.”― Julia Holter“I started playing piano when I was eight, and I went on to study piano in school, so I have a background in classical piano and studied composition in school. Writing music came later.”― Julia Holter“I take music very seriously, but it’s important to me that my music is – I don’t know if ‘intuitive’ is the word, but there’s a really important element of something kind of mysterious. It’s not academic or esoteric.”― Julia Holter“I really love working with Ramona from Nite Jewel. We’ve kind of grown up together.”― Julia Holter“I think what’s interesting in L.A. is that there’s a lot of variety because L.A. is very spread out. I think there is a lot I don’t know about, to be completely honest. It’s a very mysterious town.”― Julia Holter“I prefer to work with mystery, but that doesn’t work well in an academic environment. They want you to analyze what you’re doing, which is toxic to the creative process for people like me.”― Julia Holter“’Tragedy’ and ‘Loud City Song’ are both inspired by stories from the past.”― Julia Holter“I don’t use the harpsichord because it evokes a past time period: I use it because I like the sound.”― Julia Holter“There’s a lot psychologically going on in boxing… I think I relate to some of it. I have a respect for it. It’s like performing, but it’s also this crazy, self-destructive thing.”― Julia Holter“I was in school for four years writing music to please my teachers. That was not music I liked. And when I make music that isn’t for something I want to make, and it’s to please other people, it’s – the outcome is really bad.”― Julia Holter“I do develop characters for songs, and I think of everything as storytelling, in a way. But I don’t plan out what they’re going to sound like. I just sing over what I’ve done.”― Julia Holter“I listen to the timbre of the music, and I fit my voice to blend with that timbre.”― Julia Holter“When you make music on your own for so long, you get used to just doing whatever you want.”― Julia Holter“I like talking about my music.”― Julia Holter“I don’t ever like to see paparazzi much, but I have seen them, and I guess anyone who’s seen them knows how scary they are.”― Julia Holter“I thought I was gonna get a doctorate in composition or be a composer and be at a university for the rest of my life, mostly because my parents are academics, and that was the logical thing to do.”― Julia Holter“I am very interested in the human voice and how we use it, especially when we aren’t thinking, like the kind of stuff Robert Ashley was interested in.”― Julia Holter“’Betsy’ is one of my favorites because it is the one to which I’ve imposed the least clear narrative. To me, it’s so much more about the feeling – desperation – than any kind of story at all. There’s very little imagery or character development; it’s just about a deep and desperate search for something.”― Julia Holter“The meaning of the words in my songs are very important to me. But what’s most important to me is that the music works.”― Julia Holter“David Bowie – I definitely knew some of his music as a teenager, but I didn’t actually listen to his music as much until I was in my 20s.”― Julia Holter“I try to not think too much about how people are receiving my music. And I’m not really famous enough that it’s a problem.”― Julia Holter“I don’t think I’ll ever become a pop star.”― Julia Holter“I don’t know how well I work in traditions. I don’t know if it’s just the way I listened to music growing up and never having my foot in one particular world, and just wanting to do my own thing.”― Julia Holter“I say most of my music is very trial-and-error.”― Julia Holter“I don’t consider myself supremely talented, but I really like to try things and sift through it and see what mess I made.”― Julia Holter“I don’t think all music that is considered ‘avant-garde’ is bad, but it’s definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.”― Julia Holter“I think my music is experimental, playful, challenging, focused, fun. I don’t want it to be thought of as trying to appeal to a certain type of person or being very cerebral.”― Julia Holter“I try to ignore people’s opinions about my music – you don’t want to hold yourself back because of that stuff.”― Julia Holter“I was pretty scared of the idea as a younger person of being a musician on the road. It didn’t occur to me as a possibility.”― Julia Holter“’Maxim’s’ was supposed to be on ‘Ekstasis,’ but it was very much in its own world.”― Julia Holter“The Beatles, even Radiohead, all of my favorite stuff I’d play on the piano. But it was all very secret – for me, for fun. I wasn’t going to record myself playing those songs, and it never occurred to me to write a song of my own.”― Julia Holter“If I’m kind of sad or depressed, it doesn’t necessarily help me to write a song about exactly what I’m depressed about.”― Julia Holter“I really write at home on my own, and the demos themselves are very similar to the final recordings in a lots of ways.”― Julia Holter“Saying that something is accessible gives it this implication that people need something, and thinking that we know what people need or want is really unpleasant. I don’t like to think that way, like, predicting what it is that the people want.”― Julia Holter“I don’t write thinking directly about what I’m feeling, usually. I just let myself write whatever comes out without it necessarily being directly a translation of what I’m aware that I’m feeling, you know?”― Julia Holter“I don’t fit into a group very well socially. And that might be reflected in my music.”― Julia Holter“A lot of my personal life feels very separate from my music.”― Julia Holter“When I’m depressed is when I’m not interested in writing anything, whereas some people, I think, are spurred to creativity through their personal experiences and through depression. And for me, it’s a very low place, and it’s not fruitful.”― Julia Holter“For me, the poetic decisions tend to be calculated, and the musical decisions inspired by the poetic decisions are free.”― Julia Holter“I just always make honest music. I just always kinda do what I wanna do.”― Julia Holter“I like working with students a lot and watching some of the amazing stuff they put together.”― Julia Holter“One thing I’ve learned is I really want to work with people.”― Julia Holter
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