Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You have to make the effort with children. You can't have them thinking that I reckon I'm special, otherwise they'll start thinking they're special. I want them to feel normal for as long as possible because God knows they'll reach an age when they'll be told they're not.
My dad was a particularly polite kind of guy, very courteous. So when we got on a bus, he would always encourage me and my younger brother to get up and offer our seat to an old lady. I grew up kind of liking that, thinking, y'know, that's a nice thing, that's a courtesy.
I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
Music is there for us to explore. To intentionally limit yourself to one, two, or three genres is limitation at its worst. Music is huge; its a gigantic history lesson, and if you are true music fan or a musician, you should explore it. Its all right there in front of us.
Buddha's teaching are very simple, you don't have to break your head to understand the message. The part that I like the most from Buddha's teachings and from His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, is that the most powerful weapon is to not attack, to be able to have self-control.
I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.
For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.
Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.
I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees.
I grew up around music. My father was a professional musician. We used to have a trailer house that we travelled in. I've always loved music. Started out loving to sing to the standards and songs of the early 50s, then that interest shifted to rock and roll, Motown, folk.
I stay very much undercover and behind the scenes - most places I go, people don't know how important I am. But I will admit that my favorite piece of clothing to wear out is an old T-shirt from a Boston tour that does have a Boston logo. But that doesn't change anything.
Getting back to the point, a guy like Jerry, he deals with the business, and he doesn't see it as being evil or ugly, it's what you have to do, and I mean I know there's some really ugly parts to it and parts which drive me nuts, but not in the same way as music business.
Playing the guitar is like telling the truth - you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don't have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don't have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It's you.
In 1992, with the weight of a perceived world on our shoulders, we disappeared into a parking garage to write the songs that would change the course of our lives forever. 'Siamese Dream' represents all of our dreams coming true, while the dreams of a happy band fell apart.
I think it would be very interesting to see that many people would probably be okay with paying more for services and goods that they felt were more holistically [generated]. Which means the death of the old system which rewarded people for taking advantage of one another.
Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life. And perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree. I was looking for - when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I went to work.
I always write with an audience in mind. If I feel that [connection] coming back at me then I feel like I'm doing my job. That's why people come to my music - for some emotional experience or a perspective, either on their own lives, or on the world that they're living in.
A guy said to me, 'You're so lucky. You have people like Ray Charles, Barbra Streisand and The Beatles doing your songs.' I figured out, though, the harder I work the luckier I get. The secret of anything is to surround yourself with good people if you want a good product.
There may be a new album, and there may not. Right now, we're encouraging bootlegging because there have been some great live things that ended up on the Internet. Rather than try to stop it, we like it. If nobody gave a crap about you, they wouldn't bother to bootleg you.
He just seems as cool as ever. I can smell him. Even on the other side, there is smell. Like, when babies are born, there's two smells-one is chicken soup, which is the flesh, and the other is lilacs, which is coming from the spiritual garden. The spirit has a lilac smell.
I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say, 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.
A mutual friend knew that we were both [with Iman Abdulmajid] on our own, with broken marriages and with children. We were brought to dinner one night. . . . It was absolutely instantaneous. I couldn't get her out of my mind . . . sleepless nights - real 18-year-old stuff.
I can remember a lot of nights performing in those early years where you felt that you hit some good moments, but a lot of the time you're thinking, "Oh, God, this isn't quite making it." So I think that is what makes you in the end refine your view of things a little bit.
The thing about interviews is that if someone interviews you, and they're an idiot, then they make you sound like an idiot, too. They ask you stupid questions, and they bring you down to their level. It's tempting to not ever want to talk to anybody, but you can't do that.
When I'm out in the water surfing, it clears my mind and it makes me want to play music and write music, and then when I'm playing a lot of music and touring, I can't wait to get in the water again and surf. So, I'm striving to find that perfect balance, and it's all good.
I dyed my hair red when I was ten and when I was 11 - in my goth period - I dyed it black and I was really into witchcraft. I made mini shrines in my bedroom with candles and tried to cast spells to make the boy in the next class fall in love with me. I don't think he did.
We care about equality and democracy within the band and outside the band. For us life is about cooperation and solidarity, not about egotism, greed, or competition. This means that we prefer to work with people and bands that have a similar sort of mentality and attitude.
I don't think workaholic is in the dictionary as an affliction, but it's obviously someone who has a disease, and I don't feel diseased by it. I just think that I enjoy life and life has many offerings. I feel lucky to be able to have a forum to share a lot of these ideas.
My manager lives on my block; four of the apartments in my apartment complex of seven are people I know. It's a really close-knit community, and almost everyone on these few blocks are artists or graphic designers, because we live right on the cusp of a warehouse district.
Please don't think that I am one of those squishy types who can't handle reality. I have plenty of real-world things to deal with all the time. I have deadlines, meetings, I answer the phone, I get turned down, I wait in lines and am forced to pass for normal all the time.
I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.
I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties. I spent quite a bit of time in choirs growing up, and in the world-touring music group, Anuna. It's a sound with very rich texture, voices singing together.
I wrote a lot of lyrics in prison, but they'd all be like, 'Crawls upon the shoulders, hatred in the eyes.' I wrote about 50 songs in there that were all about jail. I've come out and thought, 'I've only served eight weeks; I can't really write a concept album about jail.'
The only people playing the roles of classic rock stars are hip-hop artists, now. Kanye's stage persona, and the way he approaches making albums, and the way he wants to be better than everyone else? That's reminiscent of Freddie Mercury. That's reminiscent of the Beatles.
I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It's like we've found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can't do that. It's an overabundance of information.
I'm healthy enough to still skate, so I gotta go because growing up I didn't have - I mean, I grew up in Montana so... there was kind of a little half-pipe in my yard, and that was the extent of the skate terrain in Montana. So I've got to go out and make up for lost time.
I think when you get into your 30s, you start to realize all of the patterns you have in your life and all of the stuff that you're avoiding. It's a terribly unsung period in people's lives. I can't think about many artists who have sung about it, because it's so not sexy.
Sometimes people will ask a real "Why are you beating your wife?" question where there's some assumption built into it, and all you're trying to do is kind of re-contextualize it with some element of truth, and it comes across as incredibly defensive, or just really weird.
I stuck with that size because I could bend the strings so well, and somewhere along the line I must have gotten it into my mind that I had small hands, so I was thinking I'd never be able to play a full-scale guitar, but I also felt like I was cheating or cutting corners.
I try to write lyrics that will be able to function on their own if they get separated from the music. But I wouldn't want to take anything away from poets, who work without the frames songwriters get from melody, and I think lyrics should be considered as their own thing.
When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
Morgellons is constantly morphing. There are times when it's directly attacking the nervous system, as if you're being bitten by fleas and lice. It's all in the tissue and it's not a hallucination. It was eating me alive, sucking the juices out. I've been sick all my life.
I kind of decided that doing music is enough because I'm already running a couple small businesses. I'm a part of Bikini Kill Records, Le Tigre Records, and Digitally Ruined Records. In dealing with my health and everything, my ability to do that? I wouldn't be good at it.
Listening to the birds tells you different things about a place. I heard bird sounds I'd never heard before. I heard street sounds and country sounds and city sounds that are very different from what it is I'm used to and I get very fascinated about how that marks a place.
Listening to a lot of guitar rock and roll music and feeling quite eccentric because everyone expected me to learn and develop like R&B. This kind of made me feel a little bit better, because I realized it was all the same, you know. There's no difference. It's just music.
Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.
I love music. I love every kind of extreme sort of music, and many different genres, and if I were to have to dedicate myself to just one kind of genre, I would feel kind of gypped. I'd be like, man, I wish I could do this or that. And really all it takes is trying it out.
That's the nice thing about being a live act. I can get the audience, but it's for the moment. It's like, 'Can I do it tonight?' And you can see when people like you. But on record - and with the pen - it's almost for all time. Really, a lot more thought has to go into it.
I like to get input from all different kinds of listeners, including the really conservative ones, and sometimes those listeners steer me in a direction that I haven't seen. But at the end of the day, my vote is always to go in the direction that makes me the most excited.