Rick Rubin — Magic, Everyday Mystery, and Getting Creative

You know, the reason, the reason that I made the hip-hop records that I made, I made them the “wrong way.” I didn’t have the baggage of the “right way.”

I think we all want to be heard and music is a way to let out our inner emotional life, sometimes in a way that can’t necessarily be understood any other way. It functions different than prose or storytelling in that the music has an emotional base to it, even without the words. So you can feel this energy and express whatever’s going on inside of

But it’s standard in the way that — the way that I get to work with artists is like we’re friends hanging out and talking about whatever comes up. And through that, things get unlocked that allow writing and performances to be more closer to the core. And that’s the goal with all of this.

Awareness needs constant refreshing

All of everything in us comes from somewhere else. And we get to take those elements, and I think I use the word in the book, re-present. We have this information, and we get it, and we get to mix it up and reform it and re-present it back to the world. And sometimes we re-present it back to the world in a way that no one’s seen it before. And it’

It’s helpful to think in terms of: it’s only play. We’re here to play. We’re here to have fun. And to use the feedback of, you know, sometimes failure is the thing you need to know to get to where you’re going. So if you try to solve a problem 10 ways and they all fail, you can either decide I’m a failure or you can decide, okay, I’m now 10 method

The real practice of the artist is a way of being in the world. I always had assumed that it was, it was about doing things a certain way is what an artist was. But it’s more than that. Yes, there is an aspect of it that’s about doing things a particular way and in a considered way. But the only way to do things in a considered way is to live in a