Yo! Majesty on gay marriage: “It’s already hard enough for two people to be together. So if anybody comes as one and creates a family – you have children now, you have other people involved in this unity – then it should be blessed.”

Emmy the Great on American greatness: “The waitress who served us yesterday at the diner on Broadway had good boobs, but wasted…it was like movie boobs. It was like: Yeah, we’re in America now. Everything is like the movies.”

Walter Meego on change: “I was peeing in a bathroom in Washington D.C. and there was pen on the wall that said ‘Change your life.’”

Army Navy on tough jobs: “The very worst one that I ever had was as a telemarketer calling for donations to the Junior JCs. I only worked there for two days. The second day that I worked there a friend of mine found some acid on his carpet because his uncle was a drug dealer. So we took acid and then we went to work telemarketing.”

Fuck Buttons on surprising oneself: “I like the idea of surprise and wonder being a very elemental part of being a child, and I think that comes less and less and you grow older because your experiences grow wider.”

The Pigeon Detectives on politicians: “They all seem to kind of tell you what they are going to do to the country, but when they get into power it never actually happens.”

City and Colour on music snobs: “My big problem right now is the indie rock people and scene…I think that they are musical racists.”

Amy Ray on holidays: “I really like the Easter Bunny…and I like Easter because I like Jesus. Because I was raised Christian. Now I’m like a pagan that likes Jesus, sort of. A queer for Jesus is what I am.”

The Dirtbombs on religion: “If I had to get rid of one Commandment it would probably be the ‘take no god before me’…Fuck that. Who died and made you God?”

The Stills on CMJ Music Marathon: “There’s a band everywhere. I’m around too many bands. I’m in a band. My parents are in bands. Everyone’s in a band. Everyone on the street is in a band. You start to go crazy.”

The Secret Machines on recession tips: “Get rid of the dog.”

Sam Champion on indie rock: “Indie rock is hating rock while doing rock. And not getting laid.”

Jukebox the Ghost on George W. Bush: “I’d want him to acknowledge that it’s kind of incredible that he’s been a president for eight years, and being who he is, that that’s even possible. And I feel like I could get him to do that.”

Natalie Walker on make-out albums: “Even my friends have been like ‘Yeah, we were listening to your music and we had to turn it off because we felt like really weird about you being in the room with us while we were like gettin’ it on.”

Alina Simone on love: “I do feel like in this age there are people with unreasonable standards because they think maybe through the Internet they can find the perfect cyborg person that meets all their needs. I suggest hanging out with the real fleshy humans in person.”

Stars on the music of Celine Dion: “It sounds like if Hell had diarrhea, if the Devil had diarrhea. But she’s an awesome chick.”

Mogwai on phobias: “I’ve got lots of irrational phobias. Like I have to sit with my back to the wall pretty much. Especially in restaurants. I always get really annoyed if the table is in the middle. I don’t know, maybe I’ve got like a fear of an assassin coming in and strangling me or something. I also don’t like sponges.”

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin on real alternative music: “My guilty pleasure is CCM: Contemporary Christian Music.  There are about 20 songs that are way better than the Strokes…No Age, they would blow that out of the water.”

Port O’Brien on sustainable food: “The bumper sticker – and it’s inside the album too – it says ‘Friends don’t let friends eat farmed salmon.’ The farmed salmon industry has really over the last couple decades hurt the salmon fishing industry in Alaska and hundreds of families including my own.”

Earlimart on gay marriage: “You don’t have to be a resident to get your marriage certificate, so everybody’s going to California to get married. And obviously all the folks that are gay are getting the best places. So you can’t find a cool place to get married because they all got them all, and there’s nowhere to get married now and you gotta get in line. It’s like the fucking iPhone or something. To get married.”

Bodies of Water on the economics of touring: “Pretty much everything that you make goes into gas. In the spring we made like a big loop around the country…we totalled up all our gas receipts and it was like $3700.”

Forest Fire on indie bands: “I feel like none of them are trying to make classic, big, best-album-of-the-decade kind of albums. And I think that’s because they are all very shy and try to be unassuming and humble…and I think that eventually makes me not pay any attention.”

!!! on the surreal: “People always say life is so surreal and life is strange, but really when you think about it, it could be way weirder. It really seems like Jesus kind of made it up as he went along and so I’d kind of want this kind of floating superpower like he had.”

Martha Wainwright on gender in music: “Sometimes you run into old guys in the industry and you go ‘Oh my God this must have been really tough in the 70s or in the 60s for women,’ because you can tell that it’s just really still a man’s world and they’re not taking you fully seriously and they’re hoping to get a blow job out of it or something.”

Jaguar Love on the French: “Paris and veganism are like mortal enemies. Because they eat cheese and milk non-stop. That’s all they fucking eat.”

Poni Hoax on the French: “We eat a lot of cheese, and these are cheesy times.”

The New Year on genres: “Beardcore. We all used to have beards so we were beardcore. Which was stupid because we didn’t sound like we had beards.”

These Are Powers on economics: “I think the price of shows has to go up. Just like the price of food has gone up, the price of the admission charge has to go up. We played in Cleveland the other night and the guy gave us $20 and we’re kind of like ‘Uh…gas is five bucks a gallon.’”

The All-For-Nots on swearing: “I like replacing situations in which I would normally say ‘fuck’ with ‘shit’, like ‘what the shit?” Or things like that. Or ‘shit yourself…go shit yourself!’”

Girl Talk on progress: “At some point people were offended by electric guitars. When Dylan went electric I hear there was a lot of controversy over that. There’s always going to be people progressing with ideas and then people being afraid of what’s coming out there.”

The Feelies on vocals: “I don’t even really like good singing. Bob Dylan’s not a good singer, but I love his early stuff and everything…I don’t like people who can do all the octaves.”

Delta Spirit on family: “My mom has always been into whatever I’ve been into.  She used to take me to hardcore shows when I was in high school and she loved it, so she’s kind of crazy.”

The Helio Sequence on tranquility: “I literally sat and waited for two hours one time while the Hare Krishnas were dancing outside my window at the park. I wanted to record a song but I couldn’t get it done.”

Film School on suburbia: “I grew up in the suburbs, so it’s a play on the idea of prescribed notions of what you’re supposed to do in a creative way. You can go to film school, you can go to art school, you can start a band. So I started a band called Film School.”

Parts & Labor on entertainment: “Only about a hundred years, people would have to entertain themselves by playing music at home. And now, although it’s more difficult for bands to work professionally in the system that exists, people are given access to making music by themselves again. They can entertain themselves at home. So it’s kind of returning back to a previous state.”

The Bloodsugars on religious taboos: “If you’re Jewish you can’t get buried in a Jewish cemetary if you have a tattoo, so I put the tattoo in the only place that I figured my parents wouldn’t see it. Which was my ass.”

Health on music history: “We’re definitely at the hinge of something happening musically where like things are just changing at such a rapid pace that it’s an interesting point to be in history, musical history. It IS getting cooler. And apparently there’s the new acid.”

Brazilian Girls on swearing: “Saying ‘cazzo’ is like, it’s kind of like New Yorkers who say ‘fuck’ all the time in every sentence. ‘Fucking’ this, ‘fucking’ that, ‘I fucking love you.’ It doesn’t matter what you say really it’s all about fucking, ultimately. And in Italy it’s just all about cock.”

Times New Viking on music criticism: “Everyone always tries to be clever. Like, ‘It sounds like a storm trooper shitting in a helmet and then they shipped it to Iraq and shipped it back. And then they put it on a boombox.’”

A Place To Bury Strangers on pop music: “Lots of these songs have about 120 beats per minute. And that’s almost like – at a 4/4 beat – the rhythm of your heart going. And that’s what tons of regular old pop songs are all running at.”

Abe Vigoda on aging: “I’m kind of really excited to experience life as an old person. That would be really fucking awesome to fast-forward into my life.”

Juana Molina on vegetarianism: “I don’t like to say I am a vegetarian, but really I can’t eat those little creatures because they are too pretty.”

The Shackeltons on energy independence: “I’m talking about the Amish…when the power grids go down and all of us people who depend on regular energy freak out, they turn on their little kerosene, they light a little fire, they’ve got a little candle, they’re all happy, they’re eating food, and it didn’t effect them.”

The New Pornographers on the meaning of ‘indie’: “Lots of people don’t even know what it means. You know, if you talk to people who aren’t in the music scene and you say, ‘Oh, we’re…I don’t know…we’re an indie rock band,’ they think it’s like music from India.”

Love Is All on the mysteries of the universe: “It can drive me insane trying to fall asleep, trying to go to bed and I starting thinking about like ‘How the fuck does like a black hole work?’”

Beach House on the great outdoors: “We’re kind of indoor people…a lot of our work comes from being in tight spaces.”

My Brightest Diamond on religion: “I was using a cash register as my piano keyboard and singing ‘I just don’t know why he’s coming, I don’t know why.’ And I was talking about Jesus. I just couldn’t understand the Second Coming. This idea of the Second Coming to me as a three-year-old was really quite confusing.”

Stars Like Fleas on dating advice: “This is insane advice…From now on, just act as if you are going out with her.”

Samantha Crain and the Midnight Shivers on geek hierarchy: “I was the least cool of the athletes…The least cool athlete is below the coolest band geek. But I was also a geek in my own right.”

Zap Mama on fads: “It seems that when we passed 2000 everybody wants to create always a new fashion every…every month something new, every week, every day, every hour, every minute. Come on. How can we enjoy something?”

Punch Brothers on career advice: “My landord told me to change styles today…just came up to me and said, “I heard you practicing. You should change styles. It’s not what the kids want to hear.”