Tyler Joseph Quotes

Radio is a hungry monster that eats very fast.

I like candles. It helps cover up for the fact that I have four male roommates.

You kind of have to celebrate the moment that you get to create something that you love that falls into the parameters of a 3-minute-and-20-second song, to try to be creative inside of those parameters.

It’s hard not to be affected by the live audience.

From the beginning, my songwriting was from writing in a journal; it was completely unfiltered. I don’t know if I really meant to show everyone this side of me, but when I saw how people resonated to the things I was saying, some of the questions I was asking, I realized I was not alone.

Pretty much all the programming on our CDs is done by me personally, so I’ve kind of been able to have complete control of what sounds I’m looking for to complete a song.

Even though there’s only two guys in the band, when both of us are on the same page about something, you can’t really change our minds.

There was a lot of pressure to find a genre and stick to it. People would tell me all the time, ‘You can’t be all things to everyone.’ I would say, ‘I’m not trying to be! I’m being what I want to be for myself.’

Even if it’s a horrible venue – a bar that barely has a PA and no lighting – we’re still there trying to get somebody to not forget us.

You hear about our conservative background and know that we’re Christian guys, but we’re not timid at all. I will take anyone on when it comes to outworking them or putting on a better show or standing up for people who are being put down.

For a long time, we just played here – Columbus is a perfect place to work your way up and maybe build a fan base.

Music can connect people on an intimate level. What Josh and I are trying to do is represent anyone who has some of the questions that we have.

Our moms accuse us of selling out all the time, so we’re still trying to cope with that. They claim to be true fans, like they’ve been there from the beginning, and they think that we’ve kind of, like, changed as humans.

When you write music that expresses doubt or concern, or talks about some of the darker things that a developing human goes through, people will come out of the woodwork to listen to someone else say it out loud.

A lot of things you do to cover up insecurities can be just as harmful to you as anything else.

Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.

You have to give them something where they walk away and say, ‘I want more of that.’ To create something like that, you have to take them on a journey. So the live show is very important to us; we’ve been working on that a lot.

It doesn’t matter what we post about ourselves on social networks or how many times we play live TV, even. It’s all about those people, those fans who are telling other people about us.

There’s been many times when a producer will say, ‘I don’t think you want to say that.’ We were told we shouldn’t be so brutally honest about songwriting or radio or the industry.

When Josh and I are recording a record, we’re very mindful of how the music will manifest itself live. That’s where we have to live every day. When we tour for the next record, I imagine there will be a new story to tell, and we’ll introduce new characters.

Insecurity, for me, feels like the sensation of suffocating.

Blurryface is this character that I came up with that represents a certain level of insecurity.

There’s variables at every single gig. I look forward to those every night. We have a lot of things that happen in our show, a lot of people from the outside watching the show might think it’s one schtick after the next. We promised ourselves we have to be there mentally. We have to be aware. We are forced to be aware.

We come from a sensory-overload culture, and so we wonder if one guy on drums and one guy dancing around is enough. Adding guys was something we always were curious about. We decided for this run specifically to stay a two-piece. In the future, we definitely could add members.

If I were to give advice to someone that just started a band and how to get someone’s attention, you’ve gotta have a central hub. For us, it was Columbus, Ohio.

One think that you notice about anyone that gets up on stage is that they don’t really have a lot of self-awareness. It’s kind of a trait that performers don’t have because you just kinda just have to let go and do whatever you want to do on stage.

For us, we make a song, and if we like it, it goes on a record.

We’re not the first people to climb up something or do a backflip during a set, but we want to do something that gets people’s attention.

We’re past the self-doubt. We just have fun with it and just try to make the best music that we can make.

Self-awareness is a character trait that’s horrible to have if you’re a performer. I think that a lot of these performers that we see get up on stage and play music, there’s a sense of them truly not caring how they’re coming across. They are just themselves. I look up to a lot of people who are like that.

We’re constantly faced with decisions. A lot of times, the right ones take more work; it takes longer to see benefit: they’re the long route.

We had so many friends who did the band thing, and one of their first moves was to go on tour, and they’d just blow all their money.

I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be in one place for more than a day… But we signed up for this. This is our dream. We sat down and said this is what we want to do, play music and touring.