Ted Leo quotes:

As I've grown older I've been more influenced by more meandering styles of guitar playing, whether it's Celtic or Ethiopian folk music or some kind of noisier jazz like Sonny Sharrock. In terms of songwriting, I don't know that I could even pin it down.

I gotta make a living somehow, and make ends meet. I accept the idea of having a retirement.

Bands-- enough with the crayon face-paint-- you're better than that.

I actually enjoy Instagram. I enjoy seeing what people who I have some connection to are doing around the globe.

I do feel like at the end of anger I have to have something that grounds it.

I love touring. But it's super nice to have a new reason to play shows that isn't based around that perennial cycle of album/tour/promotion.

I think it's become such a part of younger people's daily life to have the instant access to each other that it sometimes gets a little presumptuous. People feel like it's OK, for example, to email you with some weird personal criticism they have.

I'm even old-school Instagram. I'm here for your "What did you have to eat today?" I'm fine with that.

Some people never need to let up at all.

You play the one song that people want to hear the most every night, and for every audience that's a special thing. And usually that translates back to you.

I actually dream a lot of songs, and I try to be good about voice-memoing ideas.

I am always thinking music.

I know that the dream mind is irrational, but I like to think that if I hear something in a dream that's really good, then it's irrational... but it's not crazy.

I used to think success would be sustainability. Not being behind the eight ball...

If so much of your experience is devoted to the thought of documentation, you're already sort of spinning out this narrative from this moment that you are attempting to control instead of just experiencing it.

If you live up against train tracks, it can make your life a living hell.

I've dreamed about performing songs, songs that don't even exist, as a complete song.

Most of the time I wind up with a sleepily mumbled melodic line, sometimes with words, sometimes not. But then with my waking brain I have to decide whether it's worth...I mean, sometimes it's not worth it.

Someone once said that "The Waste Land" was a scum of poetry floating on a sea of footnotes. That resonated with me, because that's kind of what I was doing lyrically for a while. I was being very referential in a way. I would drop in these little phrases or ideas that were sort of portholes into a whole bigger realm of thought or whatever, that would work within the song, but that you could also poke through into a bigger discussion.

Sometimes a loss that just comes out of left field rings in a very weird way when you have actually sort of relied on this small moment with this or that person, as a moment that actually has defined something for you in your life.

The early 2000s for me were a very emotional time, politically. I'd been through Reagan and been through first Bush and Clinton, and it's not like I had an easy time through those years. But I just thought it was particularly rough. I have to say the World Trade Center attack was very weird for me. The events that followed were worse. It was a really long swath of time.

The obsessive documentation is itself adjacent to hyper-consumption in our society. The desire to just have everything all the time and adjacent to that is - it might be a little hokey but - a certain loss of identity that then only gets sort of found or ascribed to these moments that are documented.

When I get into the moment of actually feeling like I want to write, to finish something, I do what I've always read authors do, and park myself at a desk and bang things out for three hours. And if I have to throw it all away, I throw it all away.

When you make a record and have to go out on tour for it, you have to go out on tour for it. Whether it's going to be joyful or not, you have to do it.

When you're traveling on a body of songs that you have played for many, many years, for most nights of your life - I'm sure you've experienced this yourself - it's not that every night is not it's own thing. It is.