“I enjoy Dinosaur for what it is. It’s a unique band that has a unique chemistry.”
― Lou Barlow
“I hear people telling me a lot that the production of that particular record – ‘One Part Lullaby’ – really influenced them. I’m like, ‘What? We were dropped from the label after that!’”
― Lou Barlow
“I’m realizing I need to be in close proximity to everyone I’m working with because that – I don’t know – it keeps me engaged.”
― Lou Barlow
“Everybody talking about being afraid of being boring is boring. You have to go for the real substance of life after awhile.”
― Lou Barlow
“With every performance I just feel more energized somehow. Like, this is how I exercise! This is how I feed my ego, by playing this loud rock music.”
― Lou Barlow
“It’s cool to think about nursing, because a lot of people decide to go into it later in their lives. I could slip into school to be an LPN or an RN as a middle-aged man, and it wouldn’t be unusual.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’m a huge Zombies fan.”
― Lou Barlow
“To bicker over what could have been is silly.”
― Lou Barlow
“NYC is a wonderland full of passionate music fans. Once I got over being intimidated by rock critics and finicky hipsters, I realized that NYC was a great place to play.”
― Lou Barlow
“I don’t know what ontological means… I barely graduated high school, and I have never heard that word in conversation.”
― Lou Barlow
“I can finish a show and walk through the audience without being recognized.”
― Lou Barlow
“I wrote ‘Healthy Sick,’ from our first LP, when I was 19. I’ll happily play it till I’m 91 because it always feels good and truthful.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’m the Folk Implosion’s biggest fan.”
― Lou Barlow
“I wrote a song for my sister’s wedding.”
― Lou Barlow
“At 12 or 13, I picked up a guitar because my mother made me learn how to play.”
― Lou Barlow
“To be doing interviews in 2006 for a band I was kicked out of in 1989 – a band that I never thought I would play for again – in a way, it’s weird.”
― Lou Barlow
“That’s what I’ve figured out over the years – the way I write makes people feel uncomfortable.”
― Lou Barlow
“The first songs I ever wrote – my first, like, serious offerings – were all written on ukulele. It’s always been a part of the way I write for a really long time.”
― Lou Barlow
“If you put heavy, regular classic guitar strings on a baritone ukulele, it gets pretty low. It has a really nice, low, warm feel to it.”
― Lou Barlow
“Los Angeles was really beautiful, and California in general is a great place to live.”
― Lou Barlow
“I prefer to read into other people’s songs what I want to hear in them.”
― Lou Barlow
“Someone who’s a really good engineer is someone who’s a little bit smarter than you but who also listens to you and doesn’t impose agendas.”
― Lou Barlow
“From when I young, a lot of the things I grappled with, with instruments, was how large they were. When someone places a large guitar in your lap, it’s hard – I’d learned how to play a guitar when I was a kid, but I never really felt like I was in control.”
― Lou Barlow
“When I was a teenager, my mom got me a really nice baritone ukulele.”
― Lou Barlow
“I look forward to so many things about going to Japan. The shows are early. It’s great! They’re really early, so it helps make dealing with jetlag a little easier.”
― Lou Barlow
“I think all food except for maybe pizza and Mexican food is better in Japan.”
― Lou Barlow
“Every show I play is like a little celebration of something in my life that has gone really well.”
― Lou Barlow
“I don’t focus on one thing. I play guitar and bass and keyboards and drums, but I never stay on anything long enough to become a specialist at it.”
― Lou Barlow
“My voice is not very dynamic.”
― Lou Barlow
“I don’t really have friends in general. I never have. I didn’t go to college and didn’t have friends in high school.”
― Lou Barlow
“My family is the epicenter of my life.”
― Lou Barlow
“Literally everything I do is either write songs and play music, or I’m immersed in my domestic life.”
― Lou Barlow
“J. makes me laugh. He’s incredibly dry and has a pretty harsh sense of humor that I enjoy.”
― Lou Barlow
“I was cripplingly shy. When I was in high school, my teachers thought I was mentally disabled because I wouldn’t be able to say anything or do anything. They thought I didn’t speak.”
― Lou Barlow
“I always felt weird. I don’t feel particularly likeable.”
― Lou Barlow
“I always felt that when people found things that they didn’t like about me, it seemed to distance them from me.”
― Lou Barlow
“It’s kind of crazy how music helped me overcome the anxieties that I have.”
― Lou Barlow
“I don’t know if i have a ‘take’ on L.A. The music community is enormous, from the studio musicians to the bands trying to ‘make it’ to the indie bands… so many bands… it can be overwhelming. But it seems healthy.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’m the haphazard engineer of my own music.”
― Lou Barlow
“I like to collaborate with other people for studio recordings because I believe collaboration, in any form, makes music better.”
― Lou Barlow
“I really don’t have a method. I gravitate towards the organic/acoustic, but I still often complete songs musically before attempting to find the lyric.”
― Lou Barlow
“Most of the times that I’ve written break-up songs, it’s been different because I was always trying to get back to something: get back to a situation or talk my way or sing my way back into the relationship.”
― Lou Barlow
“Coming back to Dinosaur Jr. and actually writing songs for the band was really intense for me.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ve learned by experience that, if I get too clever with lyrics, or if I’m not totally embodying my own wants and needs in the songs, I can’t remember them.”
― Lou Barlow
“Young bands are so angry. There are young bands that are so incredibly successful, getting incredible reviews, and they are totally angry.”
― Lou Barlow
“For me, it’s hard to enter any situation with people where we’re considering everyone equals, because I bring all of this massive baggage into anything that I do, preconceptions of my work. That’s a lot for the people that I might be bringing along with me to bear.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ve managed to alienate most of what would be considered the core audience that I’m supposed to have had.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ve always tried to make music for someone who’s never heard anything I’ve ever done.”
― Lou Barlow
“Harmony Korine, the screenwriter, was really into my early work. I did a lot of stuff under the name Sentridoh and a lot of 4-track cassette stuff that he was into.”
― Lou Barlow
“Early on, I really liked the idea of being confrontational. I loved the idea of making songs that made people really uncomfortable.”
― Lou Barlow
“’One Part Lullaby.’ It was our big major-label record. People reference it quite a bit, but it did absolutely nothing. It’s like the ‘Kids’ soundtrack. It did nothing. It didn’t start anything for me.”
― Lou Barlow
“People in the Midwest, there’s a lot of regional pride and a lot more, like, fake positivity – ‘That’s great – you’re awesome!’”
― Lou Barlow
“I had a very strong ‘revertigo’ for becoming the kid that I was when I was in Dinosaur Jr. That’s a pretty insecure place that I was in.”
― Lou Barlow
“Some people play steel string beautifully, but I’m not exactly a world-class picker.”
― Lou Barlow
“When I first started writing songs, I did play with my fingers, and I had these kind of weird strums. There’s, like, three or four strumming patterns that seemed kind of unique to me.”
― Lou Barlow
“Now, when I have a four-string that I take on the road with me, it’s a regular Martin. I bought a decent Martin with a pickup in it, and then I just take off the strings and have four strings on it.”
― Lou Barlow
“My experience with Dino Jr. proved that making new music was a worthwhile pursuit.”
― Lou Barlow
“I have to focus and keep things together as much as anyone with a real job… It’s just that I know, from experience, that the more fun I have doing something that the more successful it will be.”
― Lou Barlow
“I just write… I follow the melodies that I can’t forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.”
― Lou Barlow
“Simplicity is at the core of Sebadoh.”
― Lou Barlow
“I went back and reread the Dinosaur chapter in ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life,’ and it was so depressing.”
― Lou Barlow
“There are very few songs I really hate.”
― Lou Barlow
“Don Henley is real fallback for awfulness.”
― Lou Barlow
“I don’t want to meet anybody famous, usually.”
― Lou Barlow
“I like all the obnoxious Eagles stuff that just drives people crazy. I love ‘Life In The Fast Lane’ and ‘Hotel California.’”
― Lou Barlow
“I’m fully aware, I’ve gotten terrible reviews my entire career. It’s not a really big deal; it’s something I can deal with.”
― Lou Barlow
“The minute we first started recording ‘Defend Yourself,’ I thought, ‘Yeah. We’re going to have to deal with a really terrible review from Pitchfork for this record.’”
― Lou Barlow
“I love making records, and part of really doing that and being happy about it is just that each time I’ve done something, I come to terms with what maybe is wrong with it, and then I move on to the next thing.”
― Lou Barlow
“One thing about when I came back into Dinosaur that was really cool was that pretty much anybody that J. was working with who had a long-term relationship with J. were people I really liked and that I actually may have already known.”
― Lou Barlow
“Music doesn’t always bring me to tears; if I hear ‘Love’ by John Lennon at a vulnerable moment, it will bring me to tears.”
― Lou Barlow
“I love Devo. There’s nothing not to like.”
― Lou Barlow
“Just from the beginning, I really liked playing around with tape recorders. And then, when I got into punk rock, I only really liked – the rawer it was, the more I was into it.”
― Lou Barlow
“The Music Machine is my favorite rock band ever.”
― Lou Barlow
“Within Istanbul, there’s a ton of people who are totally hip – like, the hippest people you could ever meet.”
― Lou Barlow
“A lot of times, when you record something, the album becomes less about the music and more technical.”
― Lou Barlow
“I remember being inspired by this band Godflesh, actually. They were a really heavy metal band, really nihilistic.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ve never been good at playing live in front of people.”
― Lou Barlow
“I just like it when I can understand things, and the simpler it is, the easier it is to understand.”
― Lou Barlow
“At nine or ten, I was playing guitar in music class in my elementary school in Jackson, Michigan. They had a guitar class, and I played with ten of my classmates, and we did a little guitar orchestra for a school music.”
― Lou Barlow
“After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.”
― Lou Barlow
“It’s weird to say, but Sebadoh is kind of Dinosaur Jr. Jr. My two bandmates in the early Sebadoh era, Jason Lowenstein and Jeff Gaffney, were huge Dinosaur fans. They were very influenced by Dinosaur.”
― Lou Barlow
“Some of my songs are positive and stuff, but some are about staring down at the ground and obsessing about stupid things, and it is teenage in a way.”
― Lou Barlow
“If you make a strange, eccentric record – like the Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’ – it takes on its own mood because it’s less about a shrewd marketing plan; it’s more about an individual emotion.”
― Lou Barlow
“I keep the tantrums to a minimum because people don’t want to see that.”
― Lou Barlow
“I have an aversion to taking care of my gear, a wayward manifestation of my punk ethos.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ve been trying to cut down on caffeine because it seems to aggravate my middle-age-onset acne, but I’m too tired to care. I’m growing a beard to hide it.”
― Lou Barlow
“’Brace the Wave’ is an acoustic-electric record recorded with electricity on analog-digital and digitally-analog equipment.”
― Lou Barlow
“I have really severe tinnitus.”
― Lou Barlow
“I think people, just because of digital recording and how computers have become such an important part of our lives, I think the means to record music now is in more people’s hands. It’s a lot cheaper than it used to be.”
― Lou Barlow
“I think musicians naturally gravitate toward music that sounds real.”
― Lou Barlow
“Maybe I can’t write without painting myself into a corner first.”
― Lou Barlow
“All the issues you deal with get more complicated as you get older; it takes more focus to write songs that reflect what you’ve gone through.”
― Lou Barlow
“I put all my big revelations into songs when I was in my 20s; as you get older, revelations are harder to come by.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ll figure something out by writing a song about it.”
― Lou Barlow
“Worry is a big part of my life. I definitely worry a lot.”
― Lou Barlow
“I’ve put out a lot of stuff that just confused and alienated people: a huge chunk of songs that were verbal and musical challenges to myself, thoughts I was keeping myself busy with, nothing I had any intention of anybody grasping onto.”
― Lou Barlow
“Sebadoh were always kind of the un-band. We never really lived in the same town.”
― Lou Barlow
“When you’re in a band, it’s kind of a big thing to be friends as well.”
― Lou Barlow
“It just takes me awhile to get comfortable in any situation.”
― Lou Barlow
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