Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Yeah, I came in at the end of the Notorious album, played on about five tracks and then we went on a tour. Then we did another album, Big Thing, and then we started writing songs together in 1989.
When you get together in a group, it becomes like a family, with the different personalities and the politics that comes with being in a band. It's different than bringing something in by yourself.
Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.
The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.
I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.
There are a lot of spikes that can happen when what you're doing starts to get attention or people start to talk about it. They can just kind of really do a number on your reasons for making music.
Now I'm standing in front of a thousand people. They're all looking at me, but they're sitting down. They're surrendered, so I have to keep on proving myself to them and giving them all my passion.
Companies spend twenty, thirty, forty percent of revenues on advertising to brand their product and to get, essentially, acquire customers cheaply. You get a lot of exposure on something like this.
I'm stoked because no one's really even seen Bo yet. It took me half the season to get used to not having a guitar wrapped around my neck. So I'm anxious for the fans to see what Bo's really about.
There are a lot of people, especially the younger generation who don't feel that they need to support the artists by buying their music because they grew up learning that record companies are evil.
When I'm winning, winning, winning with a certain way why would I mess with that? When I realised there was lot to be gained from failing in some people's eyes, it made it all the more interesting!
Drawing and visual pursuits were first. Music came and found me in a way. Really, what it's about is creative problem solving, and music is a lot more an expression of that than painting is for me.
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.
You can go from doing something quite silly to something dead serious in the blink of an eye, and if you're making those connections with your audience then they're going to go right along with it.
In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.
My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done.
Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.
I'm tired of living the vanilla, non-offensive life. I think that's a really sad way to spend my life, and I lived it like that because that's what I was brought up in, taught to not rock the ship.
I think musicians like me are drawn to those older desks, not just because they're legend and lore but also because they do something really specific that is hard to emulate or re-create digitally.
Cause when you're sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.
It's not the side-effects of the cocaine - I'm thinking that it must be love. It's too late to be grateful, It's too late to be hateful, It's too late to be late again, The European cannon is here.
Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.
I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.
I should watch network television, or daytime television, because I'm not sure who all these people are who keep getting referred to in blogs and newspapers. I better get myself culturally attuned.
I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.
When we talk about technology, often, we talk about the fact that it's going to be cool; it's going to do all these things for us. But at the same time, technology will deeply change our societies.
'Heavy Rain' responded to a period of my life, things I strongly believed in, things I wanted to suggest or experiment with. I'm really happy with the overall feedback; the reception was a success.
It was pretty common to form bands that only lasted a few years. Slint was my favorite band that I was in at the time, and I didn't realize that I was bummed out about it until quite a while later.
Strapping Young Lad is a vehicle for me to be wild and extroverted and ridiculous. It gives me the chance to say, 'Look at me. I'm a heavy metal guy. I'm Rob Halford or Bruce Dickinson or whoever.'
I'm not saying I wouldn't play a seven-string. It's just that I've never needed one. Most dudes who play seven-strings don't sound any different than someone playing a six-string that's tuned down.
America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians.
My theory is that there is no word that you can say or noise that you can make with your mouth that is so horrible that it will send you to burn forever in that lake of fire! It's not gonna happen.
You meet a lot of people in New York who are different than you and have different stories, so I see everyone as super individual. I feel like I can be infinitely inspired because New York is huge.
I just feel "One More Try" is better lyrically. "Careless Whisper" was written when I was 17 years old, and I had not really experienced anything that strong in my life, so it was a bit precocious.
The name Air Supply sort of came from nowhere. I get a lot of my things in dreams and I just had a dream about it one night, and I woke up and said that's just got to be the name. That was in 1975.
I think a lot of music that's really innovative is not even considered because it was made by people who had a sexual image. And people assume that it's a commodified thing, so it can't be "indie."
With bad movies, I have this image in my head of the director and the editor in the editing room watching a scene that is not happening, looking at each other and saying, 'Put some music in there.'
It's difficult for me to be around anyone for longer than an hour. Love, death, elation, sorrow, I just don't care all that much about any of it. I am at this point, more of an observer/journalist.
Sometimes when you meet a musician you are a fan of, and he or she isn't the friendliest person, you walk away from the experience wondering if you will ever be able to listen to their music again.
So I'm more at home with my backpack, sleeping in a hotel room or on a bus or on an airplane, than I am necessarily on a bed. It's weird being here. It feels like I'm standing next to my real life.
For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16, and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that.
I'm an old-timer in the business from the sense that when you do something that you feel good about there might be another person out there who feels the same way, or a hundred or a couple million.
Now it's time to play a brand new game called Name That Barcode. Here's the first one: "Thick black, thin white, thick black, thick white, thick black, thin white." OK who's going to identify that?
I used to make all my clothes when I was in Southern Death Cult [the first incarnation of The Cult]. I still make things to wear on stage and I am involved with sketching, choosing fabric, cutting.
The most creative person is not the person who can come up with the best idea; it's the one who can take that group of things on the table and assemble them in the greatest multiple of unique ways.
If I started at 13, by the time I was 14 I was already good enough to play in front of people. I started off playing drums when I was 5, so playing in front of people didn't matter - not a problem.
The consistency - either the theme from record to record, or the band, the different musicians - it really varies. So if I get criticism, I don't worry about that, because I'm still being creative.
I have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape and the miracle of electricity, and these little magnetic particles, is amazing to me.
Arranging is sort of the most exciting part of making music right now for me. I really enjoy the process of arranging because you're given all the time that you need to decide on every single note.
You can't overthink the music. Mood and intensity can't be manufactured. The blues isn't about structure; it's what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.