Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I often fake my death and then just show up at people's houses. They say 'that's a good one Thom' but I know maybe they don't really think it's a funny joke.
We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.
I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.
Music speaks to people at a level that is much more universal and can kind of trigger things in the listener in ways that other forms of communication can't.
I don't want to wreck my voice. I love to concentrate on playing the bass and keeping it very rock-solid. If I were singing, I would have blown out my voice.
We always thought the Tom Tom Club could change to anything, but it acquired this image, which was cartoon animation and this real light-hearted dance music.
Make it, not make it? What's the difference? Music is a language, it's a dance of life, and it can be a part of your life without being something that earns.
We did like 12 shows, then we did the entire Ozzfest with the first half completely booked; then we did the second half with a couple days off here and there
Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.
I don't believe that I'm better than anybody, but I do believe that I'll try harder than most and I hope that people just join me for a little bit of a ride.
Imagine how frustrating it is, being completely locked up and watching your family leave, your wife and children, and not being able to do anything about it.
People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be blues.
We wanna be on the frontlines of everything new and exciting. The old world order of putting out four singles before you release an album is so boring to us.
I have a satellite radio show called 'The Legends of Reggae.' It's a cool way to branch out and do other things. I'm paying respect to the legends of reggae.
To me, everything is connected. We're a part of nature. We are organic beings. None of us were - all of us come out of a woman. That's the way we're growing.
I think my type of personality has all music inside of it, so I am full of music, without even knowing it, without even learning it, without even hearing it.
It's very important that we instill some respect for the parents. In America especially, the kids are unruly, screaming at mommy and daddy, running the show.
I feel like my strength is surrounding myself with people who have an ear for things, and then they play it for me. I'm always looking; my ear is always open.
Hendrix was a natural genius who played many beautiful styles. Talent as great as his doesn't come through life very frequently. Hendrix was one in a billion.
In school I was painfully shy. But as soon as I had to get up in front of the class and give a book report, it was alarming - I'd suddenly be very articulate.
This is such a cynical world. The way the world is, there's so much going on and so much stress in the world and so much darkness and craziness and imbalance.
It does feel really good to sing songs about somebody that I really respect, admire, love, care about and am so passionately attracted to after all this time.
There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing.
A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.
The first time I met Ray, I was going to school around the corner from his house. One day, he was playing the piano. I eased up on the porch to listen to him.
So when bands work with me and it's 10 o'clock, usually you'd have to be getting out of the studio, we could go on until 2 in the morning cause it's my place!
All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
I believe very strongly that when it comes to desire, when it comes to attraction, that things are never black and white, things are very much shades of grey.
All the drama you see about Christianity or the Catholic religion? People are seeing through that, and there are really authentic people out there with faith.
Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn't want to reach 40 and have to say all I'd done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.
I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.
Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, and Silverchair are taking the simplest elements of Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam and melding them into one homogenous thing.
I think I'm in a really nice position, where I'm sure I could do another show if I wanted to do one, but right now the main thing in my mind is writing songs.
I went to college a little bit, and that didn't work out, and I didn't finish. So, I would play in bars until I ran out of money, and then I'd get a real job.
Everybody likes to listen to a song because it's fun, and nobody wants to sit around and listen to 'I-really-have-to-analyze-these-lyrics' songs all the time.
If you're purely derivative in what you do, then you could very easily get lost along the way. But for me, I might want to even do something else for a while.
In the mental calmness of a spiritual life, I have found that the answers to the whys in our lives are able to come to you. In my music I find the same thing.
With people increasingly faced with turmoil, uncertainty and crisis, I wanted to create music that uplifts the listener and offers a sense of hope to prevail.
I think the biggest problem we have is taking too long over things. Not in terms of getting it right, but sometimes we do things quickly that are really good.
Athens, much like Austin, is a difficult music scene. There are so many musicians there that it is hard to get gigs and hard for people to take you seriously.
If everything is happy go-lucky all the time, you don't know when you're experiencing joy and feeling life at its finest moments. You have to suffer a little.
And there are no stars and that you're never really sure who's doing what and what voice is what and, you know what I mean? It's supposed to be quite elusive.
I think too many times people can get rigid in life, put our blinders on, get locked into one way of thinking, and forget that life has many flavors to savor.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.
I know a lot of people who have tremendous commercial success and they go directly for it. There's something that has always been difficult about that for me.
I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.
I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.
It's tough to be in a relationship with a musician, because it reads sometimes as this ego and self-involvement when it's really just concentration and focus.