Josh Dempsey

“Maria Sherman: ...I also wonder if people who are loyalists to this music--ride or die Warped Tour every year--I imagine at a certain point they were sick of seeing bands they love blow up to an enormous size and no longer feel like their own. Not that you have to be younger to experience that but . . . there's such a feeling of ownership of this music that you connect to deeply. And after a while it's like, 'Okay, well it got too big. I'm out.”
― Chris Payne, Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

“As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception: a more innocent state of wonder and appreciation not tethered to utility or survival.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Andy Greenwald: It felt like a rubber band: How far could you stretch this music, which was predicated on a very intimate connection between performer and audience? Could you stretch it around the whole country? Could you stretch it around the whole world without something essential snapping? What happens when subculture goes mainstream?”
― Chris Payne, Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being