I've never taken the steps to be 'successful': I've never had a manager or signed to a publishing house.
I was like, 'Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.'
I was kind of bored playing drums in a band. Which was depressing, because playing in the band was kind of a golden ticket.
My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.
When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn't want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off.
There's a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.
I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.
If music was made by some kind of critical theorist, it would sound like my music.
I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane.
My music asks people to think critically, so how can I get upset when people think about me critically?
I was asked to audition for the second season of 'Stranger Things.' I didn't want that level of exposure. I don't want to be TV famous.
The main criticism people have of me is, 'Why are you trying so hard? This guy's exhausting.' Yeah, I am! That's my way of trying to get love.
People who want to see things in stark dualities are not going to get much out of my music.
I'm not bamboozled by the fact that people are disgusted by me. I'm not my biggest fan either.
I get sick pleasure out of going on the Internet and reading about how much people hate me.
I'm a dramatic, depressive person.
I've engineered my life so that my only value in this world is in my writing, which is really dangerous, because if it's a failure, then my life is meaningless.
People used to see things that disgusted them and say, 'I never want to see that again.' Now we've reached the point where we see things that are disturbing and revolting to us, but we want to see more and more of it.
Music is chaos. When I write songs, I'm opening the door to madness.
Interpretive thinking, as an art form, is dying.
