Love Quote by Melissa Auf der Maur

There is something refreshingly unpretentious about a musician admitting that what “turns me on” is scale: money, ambition, and the kind of sonic scenery you can get lost in. “Big budgeted, epic rock landscapes” is a deliberately cinematic phrase, swapping the usual rock vocabulary of riffs and hooks for geography. She’s not just describing songs; she’s describing environments - music as a place you enter, not a product you consume.

Coming from Melissa Auf der Maur, the line also reads like a quiet manifesto about permission. As a bassist and songwriter who’s moved through the ’90s alternative ecosystem (Hole, Smashing Pumpkins adjacent, later her own work), she’s speaking from a scene that often prized rawness and anti-commercial posture. Saying she loves “big budgeted” rock is a small act of defiance against the purity tests: the idea that sincerity must sound underfunded, that spectacle equals selling out. The erotic shorthand (“turns me on”) spikes any lingering moralism. Desire is the argument; it doesn’t need a grant of authenticity.

The subtext is also about authorship. “Landscapes” implies architecture, intention, production craft - the studio as a compositional tool, not a polish rag. It aligns her with rock maximalism where texture and atmosphere are as expressive as lyrics: walls of guitars, orchestral swells, wide-screen mixing. She’s claiming a right to grandeur, not as escapism, but as a legitimate emotional technology: build something huge enough to hold complicated feelings.