James Murphy

I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.

I was into punk rock my whole life. I never listened to the Eagles. I never listened to things that were getting Grammys. So getting a Grammy nomination wasn't bad, it just wasn't meaningful.

For most of my life, making music has cost me money. So I learned to live very, very cheaply.

I never did albums fully at DFA; I always would go someplace else so I wasn't making a record in my office, basically.

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.

We didn't set out to be cool. We set out to be an extremely tight band. We wanted to defy expectations. The more negative your mindset on coming to one of our gigs, the better for us, frankly.

I'm a DJ, and I live in Williamsburg, and I run an independent record company.

When Andy Kaufman performed, he was not just trying to be funny. He was playing with the notion of what it means to try to be funny, of what it means to be an audience expecting somebody to be funny. He was doing a dance and playing a game.

I like clever lyrics, funny lyrics, dumb lyrics. I can never put my finger on what I like about them.

Titles are relatively arbitrary to me; they take on meanings that aren't really my meanings. 'Sound Of Silver' was just, like, I made the studio silver, and I wanted the record to sound 'more silver.'

Sound sounds are terrible in the city, but it's great to listen and to walk and listen to people talk to each other. There are birds. You hear spring. I like listening to the city.