Declan McKenna Quotes

Declan McKenna

Profession : Sculptor

Birth : December 24, 1998

Yeah, I mean, having been raised like a Catholic, I have a sort of sympathy for religion, in that I think that religion's religion. It can be bad or good. People can take it however they want. My parents, for example, aren't as negative or oppressive as certain strands of Christianity and other religions are.

Declan McKenna

Sonny' is a very sad song that I wrote. It's just me playing this beautiful guitar with flat wound strings and I was sat on a sofa chair.

Declan McKenna

I have five older siblings, so we were always sharing stuff. I think my parents did a good job of letting us all discover ourselves and understand what's truly important to us.

Declan McKenna

Instruments are just planks of wood, or just computers or whatever, but they help us translate the most difficult aspects of life and make the conversations we have much easier and much more universal.

Declan McKenna

I'm pretty sure the first album I bought was a CD of 'Electric Ladyland' by Jimi Hendrix when I was about nine. I got it for my best friend from school at the time, because we loved Hendrix and became obsessed with 'Crosstown Traffic' in particular. I think it was for his birthday, but I definitely ripped it onto my MP3 player at some point.

Declan McKenna

I'm a big fan of Greta Thunberg and I'm really into Stella Donnelly's music. I think it's really incredible, important music and very relevant; same with Greta Thunberg's work.

Declan McKenna

The first show I ever went to was called Farm Festival in 2010 and I saw Bob Dylan and other loads of great band and that was a really great start.

Declan McKenna

I love hearing about young people doing well and I'm really behind, you know, a wave of young people inspiring the world to change things for good.

Declan McKenna

I wouldn't have voted in favour of Brexit if I was able to vote.

Declan McKenna

I think one of the coolest things that you can do with music is when it sounds a certain way and can be kind of misleading in terms of the lyrical content, like what David Bowie did with 'Oh You Pretty Things' or The Beatles on 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer.' That the song kind of has this double meaning of conflicting emotions.

Declan McKenna

It's a cliche, but although we're all different, we're also pretty similar. Rather than caring about the problems that affect us alone, maybe we should start caring about the problems that we've created and start reversing them.

Declan McKenna

We are already seeing the impact of pollution, the impact of all of this stuff for many years now - why wait? Why wait to do something massive?

Declan McKenna

I had too many guys with big egos chasing me, claiming they knew the way to make things work for this 'wonder kid,' all off the back of one song.

Declan McKenna

We really are already seeing the impacts of climate change, of temperatures rising all around the world.

Declan McKenna

Violence breeds violence and I just don't think the world is too complex to set a peaceful precedent, but it seems the business of war is what keeps happening. To say it's a shame feels like a huge understatement.

Declan McKenna

Not only do we still engage in wars far away from our homes, which settle nothing and fuel extremism in the aftermath, we sell weapons to other countries full well knowing where they end up.

Declan McKenna

Algorithms work when someone is doing a daily vlog or something, not when it's someone's life's work.

Declan McKenna

I have a platform and I want to use it wisely rather than just being like 'this is the hot topic' and forcing myself to write songs about it.

Declan McKenna

Just because something's important doesn't mean I necessarily have to write songs about it and release them right now.

Declan McKenna

I wrote 'Paracetamol' between the ages of 15 and 16. With many of my songs, I have this strange habit of spending months fumbling over song structure ideas before suddenly writing all the lyrics in one day, and that's what happened here.

Declan McKenna