Quotes from Yung Lean

After ten albums, I can reevaluate my life. Maybe then I'll settle down.

America is so much more 'show business.' For instance, you have Barack Obama. We have Fredrik Reinfeldt. Everyone in the world knows Barack Obama!

Shanghai was a peculiar city: so many people; everyone seemed to be working all the time. The skyline was beautiful.

When I first broke out, everyone was like, 'OK, so is this a joke?' They had to wait until I sold out shows before newspapers started writing about it.

I'd like to live in a house in Miami and make music, or Brooklyn.

I love Future. 'Turn on the Lights' is the best song ever. You can cry to it. You can relate to it.

I hate it when people try to explain music. The best thing about music is that it's invisible. If you make a song and someone is like, 'Explain it,' and you explain the message, it's like - poof. It all crashes down.

I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.

I'm in my own little world. I don't get invited into galas; I don't meet other people that I don't find interesting. I hang with my friends all the time, and we do exactly what we like.

When I was in fourth grade, I made a song about the part in Stockholm where we come from.

I don't think I could live anywhere else but Stockholm.

We can be a little less organized in Stockholm; it's not really that serious. And on the White Marble tour in Europe - I don't think there's as much hardcore fans as in the U.S. In the U.S., it's like this whole celebrity culture.

Frank Ocean called me when I was in Stockholm when I was, like, 17.

I didn't want to be a one-hit wonder. I really wanted to make albums that had a different aesthetic every album and a different sound.

Ever since I was a kid, I had the urge of expressing myself in any way. Like many kids, you want try on different clothes, different looks. I was kinda punky for a while: I had makeup under my eyes. Then I started wearing more baggy stuff.

I'm still an outsider in the hip hop community. I don't even know if I'm making hip hop anymore.

There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I'd write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song 'Hurt' in one go at the school studio.

I have to pay a huge price to express myself. You get people asking to take photos all the time; you can't ride the subway... I still ride the subway, but there's always people sneaking photos or coming up to you.

I just make videos and stuff. There's not much more to it than that. I'm a musician trying to express myself.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

My parents were definitely encouraging with creativity.

I think you shouldn't get my music confused with who I am or who we are, because Yung Lean, from the beginning, is like a character created by me. Yung Lean was everything that Jonatan wasn't. And so me, as a person, and my views on things are certainly different than Yung Lean's views, so you should definitely not get those two mixed up.

I guess I'm just proud that I kept on working, not becoming just a viral hit.

I'm not a very macho guy.