Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think some people don't even know what they're talking about, and they just start talking with an opinion, not even asking questions.
If you asked me to make a Gaslight Anthem album on my own, I would say, 'No way, that's crazy.' I would never have been able to do that.
When you're older, you realize a little bit more hard truths. You are who you are. And the people that like you, they like you for being you.
You can't staple me to the Brooklyn hipster. I don't buy skinny jeans and $50 T-shirts. I wear the same clothes I've always worn, from Target.
I don't envy anybody else's career because I feel they've earned where they're at and worked hard. I wouldn't mind Jack White's gig, though. He does it all!
We come from that school where we don't believe we're different from you, and it's insulting to me on some kind of weird level that musicians are put on a pedestal.
At the end of the day, you can't reinvent yourself past a point, because you are you, and there are things that are inherently you that are always going to be there.
I'm from New Jersey, the Shore, and Asbury Park and all that goes with that. I wouldn't want to mess around with that. I like New Jersey. There are nice people here.
You get a realisation at some point in your career that whatever it is you do, you can no longer continue to do it. You just realise you can't put out the same records forever.
There can be a wrong time - it's happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie.
I like building houses, working as a carpenter, painting. You work with your hands to the best of your ability, and at the end of the day, you go home with some satisfaction: 'I built that!'
A lot of people get writer's block, and I think you just have to show up for work, sit down, and be like, 'I'm here.' You have to stay confident and positive that you're going to write something.
I had a five-year plan to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you'll be OK.
We built something very special with Gaslight, and we don't want to mess with that sound too much. But I've always wanted to do a record where I can put strings or organs or pianos or whatever on it.
I learn tons of John Frusciante's licks from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I'm never going to play like the Chili Peppers, but I might use that if I've got a dub beat or reggae thing mixed with a soul thing.
I like movies and radios and Bruce Springsteen and New Jersey. That's what I like, and if people don't like that, well, literally you can go on iTunes, and there's hundreds of other bands you can listen to.
I've always said it's easier for bands to make a hard stance - like, we don't do commercials or whatever, blah blah blah - when you've sold billions of records. It's super-easy to be righteous when you're rich.
I can't sit still for long and need creative outlets and think you should try different things. I mean, if you're a musician all of your life, you gotta try different things. I really believe you can have it all.
When you're a musician, a lot of time people help you out; they take pity on you. Family members will kind of come around and are like, 'Listen, I bought you a bunch of groceries because I know that you're a screwup.'
I'm on the phone with this guy, and he says to me, 'People compare you to Bruce Springsteen. I don't think you've written a song as good as 'Dancing in the Dark' or 'I'm on Fire.'' And all I could think was, 'Me neither!'
People don't remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn't really that ideal at all.
The piano is where everything starts and ends. Everything is based off of it. If you understand that, you wind up understanding a lot more in all other instruments. For me, it had always been something important to try and learn.
I did the coffee house thing - we have coffee houses where people play, or we used to - and when I was 14, I started there. Just played all the time. Every weekend I had a show, or every Thursday. Open-mic nights, the whole thing.
With 'Get Hurt,' we wanted to see where else we could go with the band. We thought it was time to change things up a bit. The song itself is similar to the feeling of a wreck you see coming, but long past the point you can avoid it.
I'd like to say I don't care, but I do. 'Cause when you put out a record, you try to do it for yourself first, and you want your audience to accept it, but you also want the press to accept it, too, because it validates what you do.
When 'American Slang' came out, everyone was like, 'This is the next big band in the world, and this is blah blah blah Bruce Springsteen Junior and blah blah blah,' and I was just like, 'I don't know what that means. I don't know. We'll see.'
Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.
I'm not really into the numbers game of, like, what position our record is. But you find out at the end, you know? You're like 'Oh, all right! That's good!' We had a Number Three record. That's crazy! What's that about? That's exciting to me! I think that's good.
I could care less about ever having a No. 1 single. I would just like to be able to play and have people who grow old with you, and you stay with them through their life. We've got a few sentences, maybe, to say what life's about. Hopefully, we'll get a chapter later.
My friend Danny Clinch, who's a photographer, gave me a big, signed, numbered print of a photo he took of Eddie Vedder in Seattle. It's hung in my writing room where I have posters of writers that inspire me. They're all pointing at me. Tom Waits is like, 'Don't sell out!'
As I've gotten older, I've realized the element that sounds like The Gaslight Anthem that's mine is always going to be me. The other three-fourths of it is going to be the other guys. I can't stop doing what I do naturally, whether I'm in The Gaslight Anthem or my own thing.
When you finish a record, I look at it like a photograph. It's already taken. You got it the way you wanted it to be. You edit it, make sure the light and contrast are right, then you just put it away, and that's your photograph. Then you don't really think about it anymore.
I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.
You just have to know your story from the beginning. You have to know what you're going for and be honest with people about that. Don't sit there and say you're gonna be a DIY punk band for your whole life and then move on to arenas; you can't do that because then people don't trust you anymore.
There are two things that matter when you're making music. First, that you're doing what you love, even if it's crazy and other people tell you it's crazy. The second thing is the only people you really need to worry about are the people who love your music, not the people who speak badly about it.
I went to the Louvre in Paris, and I saw all the paintings and the Mona Lisa. You don't really see something like that every day. I was looking at it, and everything else in the room just shut out. Like, Leonardo Da Vinci painted this thing - this is unreal that he touched that. It had this crazy effect on me.
When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you've got to have your story together. You've got to study and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation, and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He's got an understanding that you don't hear that often.
One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. 'Under the Ground' is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.
Everybody told us we would never make it. Even friends would say to me, 'Okay this band thing is cool, but seriously, what are you really going to do?' I can't think of anyone who believed in us, and that was fuel for the fire, because the more anybody said I wouldn't do it, the more I was like, 'No, I'm going to do it.'
It's amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don't know if we're supposed to give answers to people, because I don't know if we have any.