Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Early on, I really liked the idea of being confrontational. I loved the idea of making songs that made people really uncomfortable.
I wrote 'Healthy Sick,' from our first LP, when I was 19. I'll happily play it till I'm 91 because it always feels good and truthful.
If you put heavy, regular classic guitar strings on a baritone ukulele, it gets pretty low. It has a really nice, low, warm feel to it.
I had a very strong 'revertigo' for becoming the kid that I was when I was in Dinosaur Jr. That's a pretty insecure place that I was in.
Young bands are so angry. There are young bands that are so incredibly successful, getting incredible reviews, and they are totally angry.
Someone who's a really good engineer is someone who's a little bit smarter than you but who also listens to you and doesn't impose agendas.
All the issues you deal with get more complicated as you get older; it takes more focus to write songs that reflect what you've gone through.
To be doing interviews in 2006 for a band I was kicked out of in 1989 - a band that I never thought I would play for again - in a way, it's weird.
I don't focus on one thing. I play guitar and bass and keyboards and drums, but I never stay on anything long enough to become a specialist at it.
With every performance I just feel more energized somehow. Like, this is how I exercise! This is how I feed my ego, by playing this loud rock music.
Some of my songs are positive and stuff, but some are about staring down at the ground and obsessing about stupid things, and it is teenage in a way.
I really don't have a method. I gravitate towards the organic/acoustic, but I still often complete songs musically before attempting to find the lyric.
I've been trying to cut down on caffeine because it seems to aggravate my middle-age-onset acne, but I'm too tired to care. I'm growing a beard to hide it.
I've learned by experience that, if I get too clever with lyrics, or if I'm not totally embodying my own wants and needs in the songs, I can't remember them.
The first songs I ever wrote - my first, like, serious offerings - were all written on ukulele. It's always been a part of the way I write for a really long time.
I look forward to so many things about going to Japan. The shows are early. It's great! They're really early, so it helps make dealing with jetlag a little easier.
Harmony Korine, the screenwriter, was really into my early work. I did a lot of stuff under the name Sentridoh and a lot of 4-track cassette stuff that he was into.
The minute we first started recording 'Defend Yourself,' I thought, 'Yeah. We're going to have to deal with a really terrible review from Pitchfork for this record.'
NYC is a wonderland full of passionate music fans. Once I got over being intimidated by rock critics and finicky hipsters, I realized that NYC was a great place to play.
Just from the beginning, I really liked playing around with tape recorders. And then, when I got into punk rock, I only really liked - the rawer it was, the more I was into it.
I was cripplingly shy. When I was in high school, my teachers thought I was mentally disabled because I wouldn't be able to say anything or do anything. They thought I didn't speak.
When I first started writing songs, I did play with my fingers, and I had these kind of weird strums. There's, like, three or four strumming patterns that seemed kind of unique to me.
I hear people telling me a lot that the production of that particular record - 'One Part Lullaby' - really influenced them. I'm like, 'What? We were dropped from the label after that!'
I have to focus and keep things together as much as anyone with a real job... It's just that I know, from experience, that the more fun I have doing something that the more successful it will be.
It's cool to think about nursing, because a lot of people decide to go into it later in their lives. I could slip into school to be an LPN or an RN as a middle-aged man, and it wouldn't be unusual.
Now, when I have a four-string that I take on the road with me, it's a regular Martin. I bought a decent Martin with a pickup in it, and then I just take off the strings and have four strings on it.
'One Part Lullaby.' It was our big major-label record. People reference it quite a bit, but it did absolutely nothing. It's like the 'Kids' soundtrack. It did nothing. It didn't start anything for me.
It's weird to say, but Sebadoh is kind of Dinosaur Jr. Jr. My two bandmates in the early Sebadoh era, Jason Lowenstein and Jeff Gaffney, were huge Dinosaur fans. They were very influenced by Dinosaur.
I love making records, and part of really doing that and being happy about it is just that each time I've done something, I come to terms with what maybe is wrong with it, and then I move on to the next thing.
If you make a strange, eccentric record - like the Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' - it takes on its own mood because it's less about a shrewd marketing plan; it's more about an individual emotion.
I don't know if i have a 'take' on L.A. The music community is enormous, from the studio musicians to the bands trying to 'make it' to the indie bands... so many bands... it can be overwhelming. But it seems healthy.
At nine or ten, I was playing guitar in music class in my elementary school in Jackson, Michigan. They had a guitar class, and I played with ten of my classmates, and we did a little guitar orchestra for a school music.
I think people, just because of digital recording and how computers have become such an important part of our lives, I think the means to record music now is in more people's hands. It's a lot cheaper than it used to be.
One thing about when I came back into Dinosaur that was really cool was that pretty much anybody that J. was working with who had a long-term relationship with J. were people I really liked and that I actually may have already known.
I've put out a lot of stuff that just confused and alienated people: a huge chunk of songs that were verbal and musical challenges to myself, thoughts I was keeping myself busy with, nothing I had any intention of anybody grasping onto.
From when I young, a lot of the things I grappled with, with instruments, was how large they were. When someone places a large guitar in your lap, it's hard - I'd learned how to play a guitar when I was a kid, but I never really felt like I was in control.
For me, it's hard to enter any situation with people where we're considering everyone equals, because I bring all of this massive baggage into anything that I do, preconceptions of my work. That's a lot for the people that I might be bringing along with me to bear.
When I start to write a song, I have the words and I have the melody, and then it's just a matter of making it to the end. I think if I have something that I could identify as a talent, it would be that I can finish a song. I kind of know intuitively where the melody should go.
After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.