Top 40 Steve Albini Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Steve Albini

2. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

4. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

6. “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.”

— Steve Albini

7. “I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

9. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

11. “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.”

— Steve Albini

12. “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.”

— Steve Albini

13. “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.”

— Steve Albini

14. “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.”

— Steve Albini

15. “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.”

— Steve Albini

16. “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.”

— Steve Albini

17. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

19. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

21. “By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum.”

— Steve Albini

22. “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.”

— Steve Albini

23. “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.”

— Steve Albini

24. “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.”

— Steve Albini

25. “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.”

— Steve Albini

26. “Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.”

— Steve Albini

27. “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.”

— Steve Albini

28. “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.”

— Steve Albini

29. “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.”

— Steve Albini

30. “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.”

— Steve Albini

31. “Buy groceries and feed yourself, even on the road.”

— Steve Albini

32. “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.”

— Steve Albini

33. “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.”

— Steve Albini

34. “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.”

— Steve Albini

35. “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.”

— Steve Albini

36. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

38. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

40. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

42. “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.”

— Steve Albini

43. “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.”

— Steve Albini

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

— Steve Albini

45. “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.”

— Steve Albini