Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Moodies is a responsibility to deliver the goods every night onstage and to do it sincerely; otherwise, it doesn't work. You've got the three guys left in the Moodies that really want to do it onstage, so I think we're truer to the old records now than we ever were.
Honestly, I never thought we'd get a nomination for a Grammy, period. To be honest, we felt that if we were ever going to get one, we thought we had 'City of Evil' and 'Nightmare' and 'Hail to the King,' and those were all big records, and they never even sniffed at us.
Everything in high school seems like the most important thing that's ever happened in your life. It's not. You'll get out of high school and you never see those people again. All the people who torment and press you won't make a difference in your life in the long haul.
I never thought of punk rock as the absolute act of rebellion for the sake of rebellion. There's a lot of that in there, but for me I think punk rock was always about questioning things and making decisions for yourself, which is a great message to pass on to your kids.
I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there’s this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities.
It's been awesome going indie. I don't need to be on a major label. I love not having to walk into a specific radio person's office to try to convince someone to play my songs. At the end of the day, it's more work, but I've discovered that I like to get my hands dirty.
I've never been one to learn scales and do exercises. Maybe I'm lazy, but I just don't take to that kind of thing. Learning other people's songs is enjoyable, and my fingers tend to go to new places because I'm not playing my music, the stuff that comes naturally to me.
There's this notion that allows people to create their own collection of songs, so it rewrites what a song is. They may only want 10 seconds of something, or they may only want this particular song, or they want this group of songs. It becomes much more user-controlled.
Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.
Whatever you do as an artist, people have to have an experience. It's not about the details or the wrong note or what tuning the piano is. It doesn't matter. It all doesn't matter. It only matters what people think when they leave the room and what their impression was.
In the '90s, I think I rediscovered my guitar. The Jam was obviously very guitar-based, but in the Style Council I just got really disillusioned with playing the guitar. The further it went on, the less and less I played, to a point where I couldn't pick it up any more.
To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me one way or another.
People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.
Having my son on drums has made a huge difference. I can't stress this strongly enough, in terms of the groove space and style that Joachim gave me to instinctively play what I felt in a more free way, rather than feeling constricted. That's true on record and on stage.
I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music.
I've got a few reasons why I've got to maintain stability. I've got into wanting people to hear my music. I've got something I want people to hear because I know they'll like it. They've gotta like it! The songs I've been writing are the sort of things you have to like.
I still do lots of gigs where I'm the support act and people are chatting through my set, but I've got better at grabbing attention. I mean, my parents would play on bills with people like Judas Priest and get booed all the way through. But they stuck it out, got tough.
I see fat kids on the street all the time and I give them free radiohead t-shirts with bullseyes on them. Later when I see them wearing the t-shirts I shoot at them with bb guns while riding a very large dog and singing kicking squealing gucci little piggy over and over
I just looked like there was only one thing I could do: be in a band. It looked like I was already successful, basically. Which is what I wanted to do when I was 16. I just felt like if you did that, aesthetically you would just draw people who were doing the same thing.
Some people are saying that my music is not for Burberry, it's not for fashion. I know where they're trying to go but if you're saying my music is only for deprived and sad people, then you're not helping me and you're not helping yourself. It's meant to be for everyone.
Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, let's say, a tramp vomiting in the sewere. You know, and next door to the picture Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. C. W. Jones on the subway going to work. You know, any kind of picture. Just make a collage of pictures.
I realized that it's all really one, that John Lennon was correct. We utilize the music to bring down the walls of Berlin, to bring up the force of compassion and forgiveness and kindness between Palestines, Hebrews. Bring down the walls here in San Diego, Tijuana, Cuba.
The idea of telling the story of the Armenian genocide - or, really, any other genocide - and repeating those stories is really important. I also think it's important to always be exposing the warning signs for what was leading up to it. Those tend to always be the same.
Remember those black-and-white films with Frank Sinatra? Those guys looked like men and they were only 27! Listen to Otis Redding singing 'Try A Little Tenderness'. That was a man who understood what a man has to know in the world. Show me a real man now! Where are they?
When I was a kid, I had THE biggest crush on Helen Reddy. I mean like for REAL crush - like 'spend some time in the bathroom thinking about her' crush. I blme Pete's Dragon. There she was - flushed, singing, clas in a tight wet plaid shirt. Judas Priest she was fabulous.
Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.
I want to suggest a feeling. It's ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.
There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on.
Having not really written any generational songs - I think maybe two or three of the songs that I've ever written have any bearing on the age of the listener. My stuff tends to be far more concerned with the spiritual and with subjects like isolation and being miserable.
There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.
We [with David Cunningham] did do Top Of The Pops. It was an eye-opener. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting - I've talked about this a few times recently, and people can't believe it - they used to do this thing called tape switch with the Musicians Union.
I got a great grandma. Her name is Pearl, and she was at one time married to an Indian chief, who, in a wonderful crossing of cultures, she integrated some of his, and some of hers, and um, it was a combination of peyote and preserves, and it was this hallucinogenic jam.
The rhythmic feel of 'Dark Days In Paradise' is completely different to anything I've ever done before. There's a lot of drum loops on there, but used in conjunction with real drums: a lot of influence from hip-hop and dance music, with the keyboard sound and sequencing.
If you play music for the right reasons, the rest of the things will come. The right reason to play music is that you love it. That's why I play music. I never imagined that I was going to be doing this, especially because I never thought of myself as an instrumentalist.
That's kind of a nostalgia thing. Nirvana was my first favorite band, in third or fourth grade. Then I got out of them. But one day in college a few buddies and myself all started listening to them again and it blew me away. They still stand out as my favorite band ever.
When you're holding people's attention, I feel you must give them high-quality ingredients. They deserve nothing but your best. And if they need information, get it, cross-check it, and try to be right. Do not waste their time; do not enjoy the ego trip of being onstage.
If a Cuban refugee is escaping, we're saying they're a political refugee, but why isn't a Haitian refugee a political refugee? They're escaping the capitalism and degradation of economic imperialism. We don't call them political refugees; we call them unfortunate people.
I'm not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.
In the past, I used to rely on the randomness of working with samples, which was a good way because it threw you in a completely different direction. You just thought, 'What if I take this samba drum and combined it with an '80s synth line or something from this record?'
Sometimes, I must admit, I'd like to have a second guitarist onstage with me, but it wouldn't look right. I'd like to play for another 20 years, but I don't know... I just can't see it happening. I don't know why. It's a certain foreboding... a funny feeling... vultures.
The disparity between being a 10-year-old boy playing air guitar, wishing I was a rock star, and the reality of the whole thing is insane. A girl will throw her bra onstage, and I say to myself, if I was the guy that pumped your gas today, would you throw your bra at me?
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.
If I were a supervillain, I would end capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia... but I guess that's a little too obvious and not villain-y enough. Because that's actually being a superhero. I would break down poverty with my machete; I would end world hunger.
You must set down all the rules to your cat at the beginning of your relationship. You cannot add rules as you go along. Once these rules are set, you must never, under any circumstances, break any of them. Dare to break a rule, and you will never live it down. Trust me.
I find that people in American are often much more purist. If you're into hip-hop, you're totally into hip-hop - you wear the uniform, that's all you listen to. If you're a goth, you're totally a goth - you've got, like, 4,000 piercings, black hair, you really go for it.
It was never so much the heavy metal thunder that got me. I was into players who played with taste and did these walking bass parts. If you can play like that, it really opens up the music. You can't just pound away. After a while it's like, 'So what? What else you got?'
I had some pretty lucky and good living situations; thankfully I never got forced out of an apartment. A lot of my friends got evicted or pushed out and couldn't afford a new place. For me, I wanted more space to set up a home studio, but there was no way to afford that.
I find myself trying to translate a lot of the things whirring passed my subjective lens into language I can make sense of, then that tribal tongue becomes rap-language and for whatever reason some people on the internet really like that. To y'all I'm eternally indebted.