Wilco
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on the internet:

Internet is radio for a lot of people. It’s a place to get music and hear music, and no amount of clamping down will change that. And anybody who’d expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It’s so antithetical to being a musician.

On not trying to make everybody happy:

My question is: Could anybody imagine the Wilco record that would make everybody happy? I can’t imagine it. So you’re confronted with that reality—anything you do is going to be a disappointment to somebody. We just have to do what we do, and that’s make a record that we fuckin’ like. [Laughs.] We really don’t have any other options.

Lyrics from “What Light” by Wilco:

And if the whole world’s singing your songs
And all of your paintings have been hung
Just remember what was yours is everyone’s from now on
And that’s not wrong or right
But you can struggle with it all you like
You'll only get uptight

The White Stripes
The White Stripes are now on Warner Brothers and Jack White recently recorded a Coke commercial. White on indie cred:

Maybe we were stupid with this naive thing about if artistic freedom and business collide, something bad happens.

And here’s White on embracing limitations:

The idea of wearing just these colors, having just the two of us on stage—these are just boxes that we’ve cooked up to put ourselves in so that we can create better. If we had five people on the stage, all the opportunity of a 300-track studio, or a brand-new Les Paul, the creativity would be dead. Too much opportunity would make it too easy. We just don’t want to be complicated, it seems unnecessary.

Lyrics from “Little Room” by the White Stripes.

When you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it is really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sittin' in your little room