Top 35 Zach Condon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.”

— Zach Condon

2. “I’m not an amazing trumpet player. It’s mostly smoke and mirrors. You shake the trumpet and it starts to vibrate in a ridiculous drunken way, or you flop notes at the right time and you don’t have to play stuff that would take seven years to learn.”

— Zach Condon

3. “The more I know, the more I realise I don’t know. And the more I realise I’ll never truly understand.”

— Zach Condon

4. “You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that’s really vague, but it’s true.”

— Zach Condon

5. “I’m very flash and burn – the first thing that comes to mind is obviously the best idea, and that’s because it should come out of a natural place, and if you don’t do that then you’re writing someone else’s music, not your own.”

— Zach Condon

6. “It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, ‘Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don’t need to understand everything, maybe I don’t need to be someone else.’”

— Zach Condon

7. “In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that’s worth owning.”

— Zach Condon

8. “I’d been living out of a suitcase since I was 17 years old, and it just got to the point where it was ridiculous. Besides, it was really hurting everything I was trying to do in music; to feel so consistently homeless was no way to endure touring and stress.”

— Zach Condon

9. “I think, if I had my choice, I would spend all my time in the studio writing, and creating music.”

— Zach Condon

10. “Often when I find myself listening to music, at least 60 to 70% of it is foreign, so I don’t understand a word of it. Melody to me will always be a million times more important than words.”

— Zach Condon

11. “I feel like I’ve met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.”

— Zach Condon

12. “It’s a natural tendency of mine to not even listen to lyrics.”

— Zach Condon

13. “In some ways, I feel like I’ve been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin.”

— Zach Condon

14. “I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.”

— Zach Condon

15. “I spent my entire life working with the smallest budget I could get. Just working with old, junky, donated equipment. The only things I bought myself were the trumpet and the $9 ukulele.”

— Zach Condon

16. “I dropped out of high school and I tried to go to community college for a little while. I can’t be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.”

— Zach Condon

17. “My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.”

— Zach Condon

18. “I think I spent more time on the mellotron than on any other instrument in the studio, and it got to the point where I was like, “Well, you can’t write an entire album on this instrument.” But maybe I would!”

— Zach Condon

19. “I just reached the point where I realised, I need to stop repeating myself if I’m ever actually going to enjoy the music I’m creating.”

— Zach Condon

20. “Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.”

— Zach Condon

21. “As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else’s perspective – told someone else’s story.”

— Zach Condon

22. “I’m swept along by larger forces out of my control.”

— Zach Condon

23. “I love the community and the entertainment too much. I’m used to it – it’s what I saw first.”

— Zach Condon

24. “As much as I try to grow as a lyricist, I tend to laugh at even calling myself that, because I think that my actual talents lie more in arrangements than they do words.”

— Zach Condon

25. “There is a beauty to touring – to be honest, there’s a way that music connects and you really feel the actual reaction of people to the music that you’re making, and I feel like if I didn’t do that I just wouldn’t know, and I don’t think my music would be the same.”

— Zach Condon

26. “I was a very good student until about sophomore year, and that’s when I just became so disillusioned with the whole thing that I just became an awful student. I was still making good grades. But I was cutting class three days a week and faking papers that I got off the internet.”

— Zach Condon

27. “I like to think that location, travel, etc, is a launching point for purely imagining.”

— Zach Condon

28. “After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there’s this new generation of voices that are really starting to burst through the seams.”

— Zach Condon

29. “I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else – I can’t really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.”

— Zach Condon

30. “I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better – make it best, so to speak.”

— Zach Condon

31. “I think that within the world of music that we work in, which is so not perfect, I think that you really do have to learn to accept your own mistakes as part of the beauty of music itself.”

— Zach Condon

32. “I put myself in the studio and I really made sure to say, ‘Well, if I would normally reach for a trumpet, why don’t I reach for the next nearest instrument instead?’”

— Zach Condon

33. “I try to shut my brain down as much as possible. And let the melodies flow, if possible.”

— Zach Condon

34. “I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.”

— Zach Condon

35. “When I came back to America, I realized that world music is no joke, it really has a lot to it.”

— Zach Condon

36. “When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.”

— Zach Condon

37. “I think that there’s a proliferation of music that is done entirely in the bedroom for an Internet audience, but there’s no way in hell that you could actually kill off a live show, and its importance in the creation of music – it’s just impossible.”

— Zach Condon

38. “I think it’s become much harder because I’m more afraid of every step I take. I’m more aware of its ramifications, I’m more aware of the less creative aspects of music – like the business-side of things for example.”

— Zach Condon

39. “My thought with harmonies and melodies in general, is that if it doesn’t come right away then it’s never going to come at all.”

— Zach Condon