Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was getting really influenced by some darker, heavier electro stuff, like Crystal Castles. And I was listening to some dub-step elements, so I thought this was going to be the natural progression, taking my soft melodies and my soft voice and marrying it with something a little heavier.
As you practice things, you get better. I mean I've worked very hard on changing my life and taking what is good about it and trying to jettison the things I think were not good about it. I think the key word is "discipline," focus. I'm always working at it, but I'm not always successful.
My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up to the television set and hit record. I'd tape my favorite movies and then I could go back and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn't have the visuals. But I think it made me really pay attention to the soundtracks.
You write these songs which are really dear to you about your family or friends, loved ones, and then you get this call, and they say, 'It's perfect for two vampires making out in the back of a car.' It's some random TV show, and so I say, 'Oh, yeah, perfect - that's what I meant it for.'
I always said to my wife, 'That's for sissies. Girls get facials.' The first time I tried it I said, 'Oh man, what the hell have I been missing all these years.' Let me tell you, I go in there for about an hour and a half, and the girl does my facial and also massages my neck and my arms.
If I weren't making music, I'd be the kid who writes into the magazines and says, "why don't you guys ever cover anything that's different? Hip hop is so much of the same thing over and over again." I love hip hop, so I wanted to make an album from that standpoint, 'cause that's who I am.
I try to do things positive on my throat, but a couple things are negative like smoking and drinking heavily. I really don't know. There's no particular thing that I do that's beneficial - it just kinda works. I guess I'd say warming up every day before a performance is the biggest thing.
You have to age gracefully. And that's what I love about Keith Richards. That's what I love about the Rolling Stones. They are aging gracefully. They are falling apart at the seams right before our eyes, and they are doing it gracefully. And that's the most beautiful thing that we can do.
I would never come out and say I was gay, because I'm not gay. And there's part of me that kind of wishes I was gay, and I think that that comes from anybody who is constantly wishing they were in the minority, you know, and constantly wants to be kind of fighting everybody off, you know?
I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope
I don't like things to be handed to me on a plate; that means nothing. I like to go through layers of unraveling and every time I listen to something, it makes me feel something different. Now I'm aware of the conflict that's going on, but at the time I just let what was happening happen.
I love my brother and respect his talent but his present demand that I must give up my equal share of the band and that our drummer for 28 years and original partner, Steve Gorman, relinquish 100 percent of his share, reducing him to a salaried employee, is not something I could agree to.
You just have to do the thing that you feel is true to your vision, and then the audience will make the decision. But as soon as you feel like you're creating a product to just cater to what you think they want, it never works. It always feels phony. And the audience can tell immediately.
As you'll come to know, the closer you get to your goal, the more it draws you in; success feeds on success. It's like a gravitational pull. Once you get into a rhythm, it's hard to stop. You achieve big visions by doing the little things every day and looking at them in a positive focus.
I'm a huge Hayao Miyazaki fan. He might be my favorite director of all time - the beauty that he sees in the world and the attention to detail. I try and focus on that while making music: trying to use as many real instruments as possible, have it feel as tactile and tangible as possible.
I am not an atheist; I believe in God. But my religion ends there. I have my own personal belief system that is so strong it allows me to do what I do. I dont have to worry about going to Hell because of Slayer, you know? Everyone has a personal belief system and believes in life somehow.
Back then, Pro Tools only had four or eight tracks, so we couldn't actually hear all the tracks. We could only hear eight at a time, so if a song had 25 or 30 tracks, we wouldn't be able to hear it until we went into the studio an put it all on tape. The process was a little bit backwards.
I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.
That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.
I took piano lessons when I was a little kid, but even before that, you're singing in the classroom and wherever. Gosh, children are always singing. But I took music lessons, some choir and things like that at school. I learned how to play the guitar when I was about 13... ancient history.
I don't think there are too many rock bands in history that can look at the beginning and middle and ending of themselves and see what I see when I think of Soundgarden. I think from the beginning through the middle and the end it was such a perfect ride and such a perfect legacy to leave.
I think I had kind of an advantage. When I was growing up, my dad had just got out of jail and he had a great record collection. He had - it was all - these were the songs. So I heard a lot of these songs, like, my whole life, so for me it was easy. I already knew what I was going to sing.
Let's face it, we do have this mating instinct that just won't quit, you know? Just when you think it's safe to come out, there it is again. You're driving down the street, and it's the last thing on your mind, and all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, he looks nice," and you're up a lamppost.
Share your weaknesses. Share your hard moments. Share your real side. It'll either scare away every fake person in your life or it will inspire them to finally let go of that mirage called "perfection," which will open the doors to the most important relationships you'll ever be a part of.
I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
Glenn's passing was so unexpected and has left me with a very heavy heart filled with sorrow. He was so young and still full of amazing genius. He was an extremely talented songwriter, arranger, leader, singer, guitarist - you name it - and Glenn could do it and create 'Magic' on the spot.
Glenn was the one who invited me to join the Eagles in 1974, and it turned out to be a gift of a lifetime to have spent so many years working side by side with him. He was funny, strong, and generous. At times, it felt like we were brothers, and at other times, like brothers, we disagreed.
When I started going to business school, I started getting calls from my peers asking for my help. I thought, 'Well, there are a lot of people like me who make a bunch of money and just get so scared of it and don't know what to do with it.' I just didn't want to be 60 years old and broke.
I think it happens to a lot of people who make music just on a computer by themselves, you don't see the bigger picture. You don't see the forest for the trees. You're looking at every tree so closely, and every tree looks so cool. But you're making a forest, man, you're not making a tree.
I had been obsessed with insects and creepy-crawlies: I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning and go out into this field behind our garden and collect insects before everyone else got up, and suddenly, all I wanted to know about was music. It just seemed a very, very strange thing.
I love playing instruments that I don't know how to play or am not familiar with. I like the idea of danger and innocence that comes from it. As an artist, I feel I should be able to do something with anything I get my hands on. The music becomes minimalist because of my limited knowledge.
The talking shows allow me to come out of my cave and that's why those shows go on for so long. I hate walking off stage. Sometimes I walk off and I miss them as I'm walking off the stage. I wonder if they'll let me go another hour. That's why I do it: to communicate, to get points across.
It's a weird situation, doing interviews. Nowhere else in the world can you talk about yourself and have people listen like they're interested over and over. Most people, if they talked about themselves for a half an hour, you'd go, "I'll give them a miss next time." So it's kind of weird.
If what you want to do is make artwork for bands, you have to love doing it because there is almost no money in it. In order to start doing it, you just have to put yourself out there, work for bands you love and for as little as possible to start, if not free, that's what I did for years.
I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.
As a child I did a lot of imaginary bits, you know. It depends on the individual, I enjoyed then knocking the nail in, I enjoy knocking nails in walls to hang pictures up, but I also enjoy thinking 'I'm gonna do that' but I actually won't do it, I enjoy imagining doing things just as much.
We're obviously not a platinum-selling band, and yet we've managed to maintain a career on a major label through all this time, and I think we always felt like we were, to a certain degree, infiltrators there. And it's been an interesting thing. It's all been like a big art project for us.
As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.
Being a die-hard Knicks fan, I remember hunting down these orange-and-blue Nikes that they only released in England. And I used to hunt for sneakers when I DJ'd in Japan. But then Nike flooded the market with a head-spinning array of color combinations and it just didn't seem cool anymore.
Being an atheist means you have to realise that when you die, that really is it. You've got to make the most of what you've got here and spread as much influence as you can. I believe that you only live through the influence that you spread, whether that means having a kid or making music.
We've got social media now where we can even create an identity for ourselves and show the world an inauthentic highlight reel version of who we are. But I'm drawn to real, not a highlight reel. The world doesn't need to see another plastic Christian pretending they've got it all together.
I truly believe that if someone is believing a lie about who they are right now, that God's desire for you is to be set free from that once and for all. Ask him to show you where that false identity is coming from. Ask him to show you how differently he sees you than how you view yourself.
I look at my kids as the Harry Potter Generation. There's a sense of justice about that, in beating Voldemort. It's a classic tale of good versus evil. To have a role model like Harry Potter that says you can defeat evil, but still be a complicated human being. That gives me a lot of hope.
The power of your audience is in the hand of the artist now via all the media - Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all of them - all of the new available techniques to get to people. I think that you are your best publicist and record company and everything right now when starting out.
Without really analyzing it, I grew up in Massachusetts, so the Salem witch trials were always something that I was around. The average kindergartner probably doesn't know about it, except that in Massachusetts, you do, because they'll take you on field trips to see reenactments and stuff.
There's so many parts of your life, you know? People say that you don't get any better after the age of about forty or something like that, as a performer. I find all that to be a misconception. I don't feel bad about the way I present stuff. The calendar and the mirror - they're bastards.
As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.
Part of the reason I'm doing Us + Them tour is to play my part in trying to spread the message that cooperation is a better way to resolve conflicts than confrontation. That bridges are better than walls, that nationalism and exceptionalism is destroying our world and destroying our lives.
When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get.
As most of the population suffers through life, barely surviving, disappointed and confused day after day, hopeless, wondering what happened to their strong and beautiful country, it is in the medias power to restore, if not some of our quality of life, at least a bit of our peace of mind.