For Alkaline Trio, Chicago is our hometown. The band started there. Even though we all live in different cities now, we still call Chicago home, and it's always really exciting to come back and play for our best crowd.

At one time I was a nihilistic punk with a mohican and a ring in my nose. I think in the course of time I'll find a middle ground, but I also carry that sense of responsibility. I'm in a position to defeat stereotypes.

'Cause I can make more money going in and doing my recordings and selling them through my entities that I have, rather than going to a record co. and them release a record and pay me 5 percent of what they make off it.

Tomorrow's not promised. You may love someone; you may have a grudge because of something that they did to you, and it was unfair, but life's not fair. Life is very short, so clean up your grudges. Let's not hold them.

I didn't know what I was getting into when I went vegan, but so many things changed. I shed 30 pounds. I felt better. I was doing better mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I was healing myself from the inside out.

A lot of loud people have been talking over the years; they have these huge voices but don't say much. I'm sure there are a lot of really quiet people who have a lot more intelligent things to say than the loud people.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

If you have faith, then your whole life is put in a new perspective. You get to work but enjoy the work at the same time. If you grow spiritually, you do what's in front of you and let the results speak for themselves.

Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you've never met, you're pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it's a really weird feeling.

There's always someone to tell you you have to. Wrong. Don't. Rather, spend time finding out who you really are. Work on being more of that. A lot better than the futile gotta change treadmill, which never really ends.

I don't want to worry anymore thinking about the future. Mi Rae... 'Mi' meaning not yet. 'Rae' meaning coming. Why should I decide on the present, thinking about the future that's not here yet? I won't do that anymore.

Working with the brothers can put pressure on my voice, so I choose to do my own solo thing so I can save my voice. I couldn't do both now. The Neville Brothers is a funk band; they play loud, and I have a strong voice.

When I first got the call to do 'Britain's Got Talent', it was actually Amanda who was one of the first people to reach out to me and suggest we go out for a coffee and have a conversation. And we did, and it was great.

My creative process isn't a long one, so I could have started a song 10 years ago and then finish it 10 years later. It's all just about pushing around words and melodies, for me. The material is kind of shape-shifting.

Wisdom is the most-sought intellectual degree whose subjects are regularly learned throughout life with an open mind in an open university called life and taught by a teacher who is none other than self-experience only.

I picked up some wonderful things just listening to other pianists that I appreciate, and that would be Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Horowitz, and Art Tatum. Those are the pianists I really enjoy and admire.

I've always been one for show business. I like performing, and I used to get criticized for having production value. But now it's all that! People need to get what they pay for! Otherwise, just listen to recorded music.

It's about being proud of who you are, being proud of your situation and just being stoked that things are always going to get better or always gonna get worse and that's such a great thing. Every day is a new surprise.

My favorite television show has changed throughout the years. I used to think 'Married... With Children' was really funny. But now that I've gotten older, it's 'The Golden Girls,' believe it or not. That shows kills me.

I am going to keep on singing. I have no intention of retiring. Actually, I always wonder whether people know my songs in the different countries I visit. I feel nervous over whether they will sing along with me or not.

I was always keen to get involved in the school drama productions and was a member of the school choir. I was lucky to have attended schools that took music and drama very seriously and the teachers were just brilliant.

I think I am a product of my mother's sensibilities and my mother's values. There has been lots of battling and lots of love and it's never an easy road for us. But in the deepest recesses, I do have my mother's values.

Sometimes magazines will take artist's creative choices too literally; they assume that I actually live the way I do in music videos. For example: the whole "Dirty" thing. Do you think I wear chaps to the grocery store?

There are some cities that I did take time out to study, 'cause I love history and one of them was Boston, and of course Rome and all of those places like that. But, in Syracuse or Rochester, or any of those places, no.

I love writing pop songs and I love the challenge. I love melodies and wanted it to be classy. I wanted it to have some substance because I feel as if I have a lot of things to say and wanted it to have something to it.

I think, for a long time, people thought I was a figment of Phil Spector's imagination because they knew The Crystals, they knew The Ronettes, they knew Bob B. Sox and the Blue Jeans, but had never had met Darlene Love.

I wanted to show the world, and myself too, what I can do. I came up in the world of Philadelphia soul, but I'm fluent in a lot of languages musically and I like working with different people from different generations.

I don't think my music has changed to reflect getting married or having kids. But... if you want to continue to write your own songs, you've got to find deeper stuff to write about. You've got to go to different places.

My dog Jake ran up to Dolly Parton, and he put his nose up her skirt. We were like, 'Oh my God, don't do that.' I didn't know Dolly, and she said, 'Watch out there little doggie, don't start something you can't finish.'

Live theater is just an incredibly powerful medium, and I think anyone who goes, whether they know about it or not, if they see something that sort of fits with them, it's kind of hard to deny that they had a good time.

I was raised in the environment where it really wasn't about sittin' around dreaming all the time, it was about practicing and workin' really hard and if a dream ever came to you, you'd be prepared for that opportunity.

My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.

I've been in a serious conversation with one of my children, and a fan has come up. I've been in a public bathroom and had the hand come under the stall with a paper and pen. That sort of thing anybody can live without.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that's such a rare gift. It's underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

The kind of people who can assemble huge crowds into one spot will be the major influences on mass culture in the next decade. The rock enthusiasts have created some of the most exciting theatrical events on the planet.

Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don't sit down and shut up once in a while we'll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

I've got a variety of different sources of news that I follow and every day there's going to be different headlines, different stories spun different ways and different sources that they're going to cite as their facts.

It rained cats and dogs non-stop at this wedding. Later during the reception, the rain stopped as the sun was setting, and the sky turned pink. The bride later said that this picture made the rainy day totally worth it!

I'm trying to learn, as I'm in my 40s, to embrace what I've been able to achieve and be proud of it. And I know there's roles that I will want to play before I die but, you know, I'm still just taking one day at a time.

I started off in architecture, and I just couldn't fit into the vibe there. I just felt more at home in the Art Department, so I just ended up there. But I would be an architect if it didn't require so much engineering.

All the Disney Princess films are iconic and beautiful, so to have been a part of all that was really a wonderful part of my life. Its all fabulous, too, that I have a daughter that appreciates the whole Princess thing.

I think of these things as obstacles rather than opportunities, because if they were opportunities it means I actually took the business of doing them seriously. To take myself too seriously is the gentle kiss of death.

The thing that can get kind of annoying is, when you travel so much, how hectic it gets. I was being interviewed once - it was a phone interview - and they said, 'Where are you right now?' and I didn't know where I was.

I was always an emotional, tearful kid. As a child I was really focussed on my fine art - I took it very seriously. I really wanted to be a master painter. I didn't think I'd ever become a musician because I was so shy.

It's not hard to connect with the music on an emotional level and get inside the songs. It's odd, very vulnerable, and slightly embarrassing to be standing and singing and playing music in front of a bunch of strangers.

With any cover, I like to choose songs that affected me strongly already. So it's tough sometimes to take a song that you love so much and put your own spin on it because you get such a strong feeling from the original.

I think if you're going to cover a song, you should definitely take it apart and put it back together as if you wrote it. I don't think you should sing it the same way that the artist sang it - that's kind of pointless.

Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.

I was a theater major, and I remember being in college, and whenever my professor would assign me songs that I hated, I really had a hard time singing them. One time, I even faked sick so I wouldn't have to sing a song.

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