Steve Albini Quotes

The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free.

It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this

In heaven, after antipasti, the first course will be pasta.

I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment

I don't feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hosebeast his wife is, especially when he knows it already.

Many rock musicians are excellent cooks, I've found, and those that are prefer to eat their own cooking in the studio. I encourage this behavior as I also enjoy the benefits of fresh food

A lot of musicians are good cooks, and a lot of cooks are musicians, but I think that may just be a result of the creative impulse finding several means of expression. Probably an equivalent number are visual artists, woodworkers or compulsive liars.

There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don't think this trend will define studios permanently

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.

You can't help noticing an amazing ass.

Pretty naked ladies will always get my attention. Revealingly dressed good-looking women will always get my attention, at least for a moment.

Im busy doing my job, and being a loudmouth doesnt appeal to me as much as when I was younger and had the youthful delusion that I was smarter than everybody else.

We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design

I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture.

Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum

I don't think anyone has exhausted the range of sound possible in a conventional rock band, but people do become slaves to their own easiest techniques

Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.

Buy groceries and feed yourself, even on the road

Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed

Of the people who cook on television, I have admired people like Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and a few others because they are free of drama, display good taste and masterful technique, and use clear exposition to bring you up to speed.

It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me.

Over the last thirty years or so, I have definitely become more enlightened about corners of the social spectrum that I had less exposure to as a young man. I've interacted with more poor people, more minorities and more sexual minorities. As you get more people from different backgrounds involved in your life, you get a broader perspective and you're less cavalier about your opinions.

The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.

I learned to cook from my mom. Most of what I ate growing up was Italian cooking.

I wouldn't mind being taller, because when I'm in the company of people who are absurdly tall, there's something about them that I can't help admiring.

There's a stupid trend in American politics right now with people who have no experience with politics and no grasp of public service as a profession just deciding that they're going to jump into it. The obvious figurehead of this whole "I am an idiot, therefore I can be a politician" is Donald Trump. People think that ignorance of a profession is somehow qualifying for that profession. It's utterly baffling.

The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.

The bands that have been the most important to me, and the records that have been the most important to me as a fan, have been records that surprised me for one reason or another.

I think good-looking naked ladies turn on the majority of men.

The only kind of restaurant I could imagine doing would be the extraordinarily snooty restaurant with three or four tables, and I would cook what I felt like cooking. And you could eat it or not.

If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength

Toast is bread made delicious and useful.

Un-toasted bread is okay for children's sandwiches and sopping up barbecue sauce, but for pretty much all other uses, toast is better than bread. An exception is when the bread is fresh from the oven, piping hot, with butter melting all over it. Then it's fantastic, but I would argue that bread fresh out of the oven is a kind of toast. Because I'm an asshole and I refuse to be wrong about something.

When I'm in a restaurant, I don't eat red meat.

It doesn't taste like anything. But if a friend of mine is grilling stuff at his house, its almost always great.

Record labels, which used to have complete control, are essentially irrelevant.

The process of a band exposing itself to the world is extremely democratic and there are no barriers. Music is no longer a commodity, it’s an environment, or atmospheric element. Consumers have much more choice and you see people indulging in the specificity of their tastes dramatically more. They only bother with music they like.

I stopped drinking almost immediately after I had ready access to liquor, when I got to college. It almost immediately lost its appeal for me.

Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.

I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber. I do the job and you pay me what it's worth.

I'm not a particularly good cook. Part of it is that it is the kind of cooking anybody could do if they bothered. It's improvisational. I cook with whatever I have laying around.

I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I've said many times that I think they're part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do things essentially in cooperation with their audience. It's pretty amazing, actually.

Clip your year-end column and put it away for 10 years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it.

What's the most outrageous thing I've ever done? Let's just say I don't think I've done it yet. The most outrageous thing is yet to come.

If I were a gambling man I would put all my money on there not being anything other than this universe.

When people are absurdly tall, they command everyone's attention when they walk into a room. Nobody's ever dismissive of somebody for being too tall.

Find people who think like you and stick with them. Make only music you are passionate about. Work only with people you like and trust. Don't sign anything.

I'm only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band's own perception of their music and existence. If you commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you.

New York has magnificent eating available, both in restaurants and in the materials available to home cooks in the many specialty markets.

Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.

There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

I want to be in cahoots with bands who want to make the record of their dreams.