Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
From Eden is spoken from the Devil's point of view. I always loved in blues music how the Devil can be a character who walks and talks. So awful is your state that it seems to be a presence around you. I don't really spend time thinking about the nature of God but I'm interested in what people say about God, how it is used to control people and change policies in the physical realm.
It’s interesting that most gadgets are called ‘iPhone’ and ‘iPod,’ with that ‘i’ prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led – a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you’re not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You’ve got to let the subconscious in – that’s my main message to the world.
From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred 'pop type' music and we preferred what is now called 'underground'. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrast in tastes, I'm sure, did more good than harm, musically speaking, and contributed to our success.
We Die Young is about gang violence. That was something that was happening in Seattle, something that kinda opened our eyes. It just seemed like things were getting out of hand. Incidents where kids were getting shot, and getting their tennis shoes ripped off their dead bodies. It just seems like these kids are dying at younger and younger ages and getting involved in gang activity.
You know what I think the guy who reviewed the live show for Pitchfork suffers from? Shy/asshole confusion. I'm not an asshole. I don't think I have to prove that to anyone, but I'm just putting that out there. I just think people should know that I'm not trying too hard. I think some people are just bitter that they ended up reviewing the show rather than playing the show, perhaps.
It's symbolic of how I feel, with cameras on every street corner. Being watched all the time, having my sense of freedom invaded. Privacy is an important thing, and it has been eroded over the past few years. Now they're talking about body scans at airports. Democracy becomes a sham the second you have to give way to authorities who can do any kind of search that they want with you.
If girls are ever going to start to be in bands as the norm rather than as the exception. They need to see people up there that have just started playing. That's something that had gotten lost. I think that's why there are so many great girl punk rock bands now. It's like you have to make up your own rules because the old rules don't apply. You just have to start with what you have.
I can always be reminded how small I am when I try to surf a wave that's a little bit out of my league, and I just get pummeled. And, when your life flashes before your eyes kind of stuff, deep down under the water where you don't know what's up or down, and that kind of thing, or just Mother Nature reminding you how small you are compared to it. That's kind of the main thing for me.
If I have a strong dislike for something, obviously that garners an equal amount of derision, towards me from the audience. And that's fine, as long as it's within the bounds of decency and isn't too personal in the vitriol. That's what makes the blog interesting, and that's what makes reading it interesting and that's what makes writing interesting. You don't want everyone to agree.
Wholeness is sort of a dubious concept. Because in terms of the human body and literal wholeness and structures, you think: "here are the structures that help make me whole." Family, or school, or the city I live in. When those structures are dysfunctional or decaying, you end up kind of Frankensteining pieces from everywhere in order to make yourself sated and comfortable and alive.
I started playing around with local rock band swith the alto. And then, in a nutshell, somebody fell ill one night, the lead singer of one of the bands, and they knew I could sing, so they asked me if I would stand in. And I quite enjoyed it, actually, I must say, at 14. It was a real trip to have girls wave at you and smile and everything just because you opened your mouth and sang.
I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything. Vocals can be so many things, like, "Hey, I'm Michael Jackson, and this is my iconic voice," or a choir of people sounding like Mozart's Requiem. Mariah Carey is my favorite singer because her voice sounds utterly groundless. It's not even a human voice; it almost sounds mechanical.
I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.
Maybe in my personal life, but as far as my career, I've been offered some humongous things in my career and didn't take them. I look back and think, oh man, well I'd have been well off monetarily wise, but artistic wise I don't know. I'd have to say, personally, in my personal life, yeah, but in my musical life, on twenty-twenty hindsight I would say just take the good with the bad.
In political sense, it doesn't really matter what I do on my own, but it's so important to rally some sort of collectiveness and reignite a collective vision, and I think that's something you can do effectively through art and music, and through writing and entertainment - and just through like, pop culture. It's about spreading ideas and making people think differently, essentially.
What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.
I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.
1961 was when I was really into clothes. I left school at 15 and started copying a bloke who used to go up on the train to London with me; Leslie, I think his name was. He was like, top mod of his own area. He wore Italian jackets with white linen jeans. Boy, was that cool! I mean, that's in style now - it's very much the L.A. look. But he was wearing it then, and it looked supercool.
The best pay off in the world is when someone comes up to you and says, 'your music has helped me with some pretty rough times through life. I don't know if I would still be here if it was for your music whether it be country music or heavy metal has done for me.' That's ultimately the biggest payoff for me. I hear it from young kids to military guys and military women to older folks.
Since the last tour I have done a lot of extensive travel to Iraq, Kuwait, Siberia, South Korea and other places and picked up some hopefully interesting stories. We are living in interesting times and as bad as things are, I draw considerable inspiration from some of the things I'm seeing and people I'm meeting. I'm looking forward to getting out on the road and talking about it all.
I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme.
I started going blind and my optic nerves of my eye started giving me tunnel vision. I also started fainting a bit and struggling to think. I felt a lot of pressure in my head all the time. That was when it got too much. I'm in a very, very fortunate position now where I've had it taken out once. And now it's back I'm being monitored. I think people at home should be checked for this.
Marriage is a really scary thing. I'm excited about it. I know it's not a mistake, it's the absolute right thing to do. I'm really happy about it. I really, really love my fiancee. We're good friends and I think it's going to work. But that's just the point - it's going to take work. It does make me feel vulnerable to be like, wow, I'm committed to this person for the rest of my life.
In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore…Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.
However, when given the chance, many people choose cocaine over love. I wouldn’t say that’s a bad choice. The endorphins released during infatuation are similar to heroin. OxyContin, “the cuddling hormone,” most often found in new mothers and newlyweds, is like ecstasy; every touch tingles. I think I read that somewhere. Love exists in powder. Love exists in pills. We are all addicts.
I'd done a drawing of the model using only peripheral vision, looking at a spot on the wall to the right of where she sat. It wasn't really a drawing of her I produced; it was a drawing of the cloud of lights and darks she dissolved into when I focused on the spot. You could look at my drawing of this cloud and read it as a nude female figure, though a little translation was required.
Sometimes when you get an opportunity to appropriate your work, or use whatever collateral you have, for something good, you think, "Well, yeah, you should do this." You're not in any way qualified to do it, but I was so sick of hearing so many unqualified people say that global warming doesn't exist, I thought, "Well, I'm no less qualified than they are, so I can deal with doing it."
I am in no position to judge other women, you know. But I mean, why did she get pregnant? It's not good for women to go through the procedure of abortion and have something living sucked out of their bodies. It belittles women. Even though some women say, 'Oh, I don't mind to have one,' every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem smaller and smaller and smaller.
It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.
Music is a universal language insofar as you don't need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music. It doesn't matter what their music is, you can find something that you can play together, with what their culture is. The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.
We were just amazed we were putting out a record. We were, and are, still learning. But we've never cared much for professionalism as long as the energy was there. Like our live shows: We're out of tune and use a lot of feedback. That's not on purpose or because we don't care, we're just musically and rhythmically retarded and we play so hard that we can't tune our guitars fast enough.
We never really set out to talk about California on the album ['California'], it was something that we noticed that was happening about three-quarters of the way through the recording process. We were looking at which songs we thought would make the record and we realised that there was this theme coming through. I think it's just a product of being in California for as long as I have.
For me, there's always an early-'70s sense. There's always a sprinkle of it - if I do it exactly like that, sometimes it becomes too costume-y or too thought out. But the influences are there, without a doubt, always, because to me, that was the part that I also felt was the most defining of my own personality and my own style, and I also think that it's timeless. You never look wrong.
I just find that I enjoy the music that feels like there's a journey to the top of this mountain, then you're at the top of the mountain finally with this magical feeling, and you're stoked because you made it, and you're up there, but there's a little bit of sadness to think of all that you lost along the way to get there. I guess I relate and enjoy the path and the struggle very much.
I think there is just this inherent understanding between us at a subconscious level when we play. It's like we anticipate each other's next move before it's made and we all land together somehow. It's that "something" that really good bands have that makes what they do unique. It's also something that is easy to take for granted, especially as the years spent performing together go by.
I started thinking about how life is a lot like getting pushed out of a plane. You didn't ask to be here, none of us did. But we're all careening through space towards an eventual end that no one's gonna be able to put off. That's the only thing that's definite, this impact. So I started to think about how a lot of us fall at an incredible velocity, and it's over in the blink of an eye.
I did one year of school and I was doing correspondence school, which was actually another happy accident. Correspondence school is basically home school, but you teach yourself instead of your parents teaching you. I found that to be one of the most important things in my life is that I learned how to teach myself things. I feel like that's something that schools should actually teach.
Sometimes you have to wonder if there isn't an ejector seat built into having a popular-music career. We were lucky when we started. We were already old when we started - you could have described our first album as "aging Brooklyn guys." We were in our late 20s. We weren't octogenarians, but a lot of bands were already younger than us. Fortunately, we've held on to our manly good looks.
In Germany there's something about rock music much more political than it really is - like everything you were doing was an indictment of the American culture. I read an interview with one of the members of Sebadoh. He was saying he had just got back from touring Germany for the first time in five years or whatever, and one of the interviewers asked him, "Why aren't you still relevant?"
I didn't really get that good at cutting because I didn't have those three years of gestating and nurturing my skills in the bedroom. I was kind of, like, out and playing in clubs after three of four months, because I was pushy with promoters. But I would just listen to the radio - Stretch Armstrong and Red Alert - and then I would go hang out with Mayhem, who did the WNYU hip-hop show.
I feel like my strong side is not being technically perfect at the piano, but at curating my own work. It's not painful for me. I don't feel sad when I have to leave things out, put them in the safe, and not have them in public. I realize many artists feel sad about this process, but for me that's the most exciting part: By losing the weaker moments you make the strong moments stronger.
I think we have a little added appreciation for the Canadian fans, maybe because there's a lot of Canadians that want a Canadian band that seems to tour a lot more in the U.S. that are like, "Whatever. You guys don't care about us. You just turned your back." Our fans, the people that we hang with in Canada when we play, seem to be super-supportive still. We have a lot of love for that.
My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
I think life is really hard sometimes. It's not easy to wake up every day and go through what you go through. But the beautiful moments that you share with people that you love, or even experience alone, are worth all of the pain and sorrow. Those moments should be cherished, and I think that's what music is all about-to remind people of the beautiful moments that are in everybody's life
The most rewarding possible thing that a songwriter or an artist of any kind can experience is to hear firsthand from the mouth of somebody else that they don't know the weight or gravity or intensity that something they've made has brought out in somebody else's life. It's simultaneously flattering and humbling. It makes me so thankful that I've been so lucky to be able to do this work.
...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.
I think that the revolution in music is over, and what's left is a mop-up action. It's a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It's mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that. Everything is traditionally slow - much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.
My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.
It just seemed like all the records I have made since Creedence Clearwater Revival have all been sort of pushed off center. I felt like I was dancing around the outskirts of what is my true center. With this album, I really wanted to stay on the mark, right in the middle, right where rock 'n' roll is. I wanted this one to be easier, a lot more fun than some of the past records have been.
I think every man and woman is a star. It's just a matter of realizing and becoming it. It's all a matter of willpower. The world is just how you see it. If you want to have other people tell you how to see it, then you can. But if you want to look at it differently, then it's limitless what you can do. That's why I don't feel the need to be one person. I can be as many people as I like.