Steve Albini Quotes
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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.
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In terms of other people's perception of me, that's their business. There are people who I have never met but, for whatever reason, I am certain that these people are jack-offs. I've never met Billy Joel, but I'm absolutely convinced he's an asshole. I can't justify that opinion, that's just what I think. But my opinion about Billy Joel isn't going to affect him in the slightest. In the same way, I am sure there are people out there who are completely convinced that I am an asshole, for whatever reason. They might even feel more justified than I feel about my presumptive opinion of Billy Joel.
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I learned to cook from my mom. Most of what I ate growing up was Italian cooking.
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By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum
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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.
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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.
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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
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My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.
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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.
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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.
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Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment
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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.
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I hate 'foodie' because it's cute, like pretty much all diminutives associated with eating. 'Veggies,' 'sammies,' 'parm.' I eat food, and I cook it: it's for eating, preferably with friends, and I don't make a fetish out of it.
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My dad, Frank Addison Albini, was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didnt romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or proving his worth as a real man.
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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.
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The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free.
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For less than the cost of a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, you can buy a loaf of fresh bread and some good cheese or roast beef, which you will enjoy much more.
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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.
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I don't feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hosebeast his wife is, especially when he knows it already.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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In heaven, after antipasti, the first course will be pasta.
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In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.
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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.
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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.
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It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this
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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.
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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
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