Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was a kid I was definitely into Neil Young.
Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.
Sometimes it's hard for me to just be the guitar player and lose myself.
When I learning to write songs, I never really was interested in the chorus.
I was a bouncer, if you can believe it for a while in a sports bar. I let everybody in.
I didn't want to start aiming for fame. It would be silly to not have entertained offers.
I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.
No I don't play bluegrass harmonica or anything like that. I don't listen to country or bluegrass records.
I don't like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.
I've just grown up. Respecting yourself and your art means taking an interest in the other responsibilities.
With 'Under the Pressure,' I just found two chords I liked, and built it up, did like a ten-minute drum pattern.
When you make a record, you get to live in an imaginary world where you have the best kind of band on every song.
It's rare in life to look at all the people around you and realize that they're all invested in what you're doing.
In high school, I was head of the lab. I dumped a whole five-gallon bucket of D-76 on my head once. It ruined all my clothes.
That little window like 2004 through like 2010 was probably the most, like most inspiring time of my creative life, for sure.
The ability to work every day was a big part of L.A.'s effect on my process and the band coming out from Philly once a month.
My kind of music is probably not going to shoot to the top, but I'm fine with that. There's still enough rock'n'roll soldiers.
I work off of my early demos. I'll keep adding on top of that, but I usually gravitate towards whatever that original idea was.
My siblings weren't playing music; I was the only one who wanted to buy a guitar and was listening on headphones the whole time.
I love Tom Petty the way a lot of people love him. He's got so many amazing songs, and you know them by heart. They're classics.
I like to work hard and I like to work for somebody. I like to stay late and clean up the back and show the boss in the morning.
I don't know what the sound is or the song is until I've spent a lot of time on it. I'm always chipping away at it, rethinking it.
If I improvise vocals at an early stage of the song, I just kind of listen to the roll, and then I kind of have a little vocal hook.
I try to take whatever I can from the songs I grew up listening to, these vibed-out pop numbers, and make them my own in some weird way.
I love when things can repeat and you can make things slightly different each time and just react to the music and react to the recording.
I learned Neil Young songs, Bob Dylan songs and older songs. It wasn't until I moved to Philly that I had aspirations to maybe forming a band.
I'd love to do denim merch sometime, though. That's pretty much the mainstay of my wardrobe. I have a bunch of denim jackets I wear all the time.
The Heartbreakers were what you imagine being in a band would be like - best buddies and great players and guys who took it all really seriously.
I'm still undisciplined in the fact that I'm not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.
My mom and dad never really had friends, never went on vacations. We stayed home. And I see a similarity there: A general anxiety runs pretty deep.
All those crazy Impressionist painters in France were friends but they would write about how jealous and competitive they were. That's what makes good art.
I can't just go into the studio with one idea and be all in on that, 100 percent. It takes me a while to arrive at something that feels like it's finished.
With 'Slave Ambient', I was writing things on top of loops. Now I really get the structure of the song down, but I leave room for improvisation in the studio.
All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.
I'm really picky about stuff like videos or even pictures of the band, but at the same time, I don't really know what it is I want; I just know what I don't want.
In terms of tone and style, I've always been influenced by a lot of different players. I love Nick Drake, Mike Bloomfield and Sonic Boom. I like those three a lot!
As he grew older, his material was just as relevant and just as exciting and the band's just as killer... It seems surreal that there's no more Tom Petty, in person.
I try to just keep chipping away at, you know, this little idea you may start with and then work on something for seven, eight months. Eventually it just kind of turns into something.
I ended up renting a studio in L.A. for about 15 months. Starting in January of 2016, some of the guys in the band were coming out once every five to six weeks for like five days a time.
I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.
I immediately felt welcomed, whereas in Massachusetts, I'd grown up there but I felt like such an outsider. Within a week or two of moving to Philly I felt there was something I could be a part of.
When I was a kid, the Patriots were my team, but I didn't really care, you know what I mean? I got taken to a game once by a friend and it was the coldest I've ever been in my life. It was torture.
In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.
Somewhere between this kind of cruising freedom, and this understated moment where all these little things intertwine to create a bigger sound. You don't want one thing to be bright, or too prevalent.
I think from an East Coast point of view, you'd be like, 'Oh, a California record's a sunny record.' It's like you spend three hours in the studio because the rest of the time you must be at the beach.
It's cool that our stuff is received as it is, and our stuff is fairly long. But from a songwriter's purview as well as an exercise, I'm trying to write shorter material and find ways to condense ideas.
I started guitar when I was like thirteen. I had a friend whose dad had an electric guitar. In sixth grade or seventh grade I went over and played it and immediately I was super excited by the whole thing.
I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.
You can't really take it for granted that people listen to your music. I want to write songs that are on par, at least in my mind, with the ones I've loved for my whole life and that will be around forever.
When you're in the moment and not over thinking the song is when things tend to really work. You're not so focused on the minutiae. You're focused on the overall feel, and that's the stuff that I get from the demos.