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Top Ten Quotes

Time for some fun with year-end lists. I'll get to my favorite records of the year (you can read about ten of them in the new issue of Punk Planet), but for the time being, let me share some quotes I gathered from interviews this year.



Top Ten Quotes I Heard This Year During Book Interviews:

10. "I don't feel like I've changed the reasoning that I'm doing any of this shit. You're playing a show for the people that are inside the room, not the people who didn't bother to show up. You're putting out a record for the people who dig it."

-- Chris Wollard

9. "His singing gave me the courage to sing like a girl."

-- Jeremy Enigk on Shudder to Think's Craig Wedren

8. "When you're talking about rock -- and this goes for any type of rock -- if it isn't a little bit dangerous and it doesn't piss off the parents a little bit, it's questionable and suspect. That's just a safe assumption to me."

-- John Congleton

7. "That whole section was blank. I was like, 'Dude, you can't have this instrumental section. You gotta have something there. And we gotta have some back and forth or something like.' And then Chuck goes, 'How about, "Live your heart and never follow"'? I was like, 'Great.'"

-- Walter Schreifels, on recording Hot Water Music's "It's Hard to Know"

6. "To me, it always seemed like gang violence. And I think that whole gang mentality is something I just could not relate to. I can understand how some kind of misdirected person is gonna come to that and that's gonna be their kind of ad-hoc family. I don't know – I was screwed up in different ways. I looked for my family values elsewhere in hardcore."

-- Aaron Burgess, on straight edge

5. "Every generation's older people are convinced that they were the last [that] did anything worthwhile and that none of the kids are taking up the torch like they did, and it's just a load of shit. People just love to complain."

-- Kyle Ryan

4. "I think [with] punk rock, you have to be young. It's an inheritantly young thing because with age, you become a realist. I don't know how much I would want to pine over the kind of romantic subtitles that Blake was pining over on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy."

-- Trevor Kelley

3. "If you wanna know why so much bad music is popular, well look at the demographic of the people that buy all the records, it's all babysitting money. Somebody who's fourteen/fifteen year-old, no offense to these people, they're valid human beings, but they have not had a lot of life experience."

-- John Congleton

2. "The more we talked about breaking up, the more bearable the tour became."

-- Chris Wollard, on Hot Water Music's first break-up.

1. "The truth takes time to tell."

-- William Goldsmith

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