Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I really wanted to maintain that bedroom philosophy to creating stuff. I don't believe the hype; I think a great record is because I put a lot of love into it. If people are feeling it, that's fantastic.
It's hard for me to be serious. I can't really rub oil on me and go all the way with it [laughs]. I hear some screams and I laugh to myself. I always get a kick out of it. I'm three feet tall, basically.
I believe in doing vinyl. As long as vinyl can still be made into a high-quality standard, I'm going to still make all my records as a side A and a side B because that's how I grew up listening to music.
I can find every jacket under the sun that I like. But I cannot find trousers cut the way I want them. They're all really tight at the bottom. Nobody does a boot cut on a trouser leg. It drives me crazy.
The way to write really good songs is to write about the things that happen in your life and where you are in the moment, and writing about stuff that happens in your 30s is not the sexiest song subject.
I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia. But it's not. It's airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don't get off on that part of it at all.
People lump us into the nu-metal category, and there might be a hint of that stuff, but if you really listen to a nu-metal band and then listen to Slipknot, it's so apples and oranges that it's retarded.
I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.
Every declarative statement that comes out of an interview with somebody is actually in response to a question. It's like this very real interpersonal dance where one of the people involved is invisible.
I don't intend to be a performing flea any more. I was the dreamweaver, but although I'll be around I don't intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don't want to die at 40.
I just feel really lucky to have had some hits because we had a lot of time where we didn't have them. It's better to have a hit. You can ask anyone - U2, Green Day - and they'll tell you the same thing.
We've had all the ebbs and flows of any real career. Trust me. We've been at the highest highs and pretty low lows. But that said, we always stay true to who we were. We didn't jump on fads and fashions.
Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can't do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.
I'm just going to go out there, and if people want to put me on the front of their magazine or whatever, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine as well. I'm just going to go out there and make my music.
When I was fourteen years old, I got arrested for battering an officer and resisting arrest with violence. I was beat up by the cops and they charged me with that. There was no original arresting charge.
I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.
Like everybody, you get nights where you feel completely depressed. You start thinking about all the bad things and think about the glass half empty - instead of half full. There's no explanation for it.
When Paul was arrested in Japan for having hash in his luggage, I thought he'd be out that night. But it became really serious stuff when he was kept in a cell. I became more fearful as the days went by.
I feel like our whole discography up through 'Hail to the King' was young, fun, and exciting. It was aggressively driven. 'The Stage' was the first step in the band becoming a more mature musical entity.
The last few years I became a lot more into sports. Growing up, the sports I liked were independent sports, like skateboarding. I was really into skateboarding, and not necessarily team televised sports.
I wanted 'Imitations' to be a fully realized record from start to finish, with a cohesive sound and a sequence that took you from one song to the other, just like I would with a record of original stuff.
I think, you know, for me, whatever I need to slot into to make that music the best it can be or help the artists, or whoever I'm working with, achieve whatever vision they have in their head for a song.
A band that we supported called Blackfish in Manchester, played the most insane gig I've ever been to. Everything was set on fire, and then they came on and played one of the coolest gigs I've ever seen.
I'm sure if we had made an album that was more traditional would have been released immediately. When we actually play this music on stage and people become familiar with it, it will become more popular.
I don't really give a f**k about the mainstream. The mainstream doesn't offer me anything. Why would I offer it anything? I love the world I have. I love the sort of subculture that Green Day represents.
Since learning Transcendental Meditation from Maharishi in December 1967, it has been a valuable practice which has enabled me to go through some very stressful life experiences while remaining centered.
I identify as being an independent artist. I think people often forget that Indie is actually short for independent. For me, the word has a meaning more than what it connotes from an industry standpoint.
We can get rid of all the plastic bags and plastic straws in the world - and we need to - but nothing is going to get better until we can make the people at the top see that there are changes to be made.
The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
I never get tired of performing to people who want to hear me. Hell, that's my handshake to the world. I'm doing just what I've wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.
I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
With no faith, purely as a scientific experiment, I started meditating and watched if it changed my music. It did, but it didn't make it more mellow. It made it easier to get into the flow of creativity.
I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.
It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.
I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law.
Whether they are actual poets or their music exemplifies a poetic sensibility, generally speaking, the Americana artist shuns commercial compromise in favor of a singular vision. Which resonates with me.
What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?
I think it's a sacrifice that you have to make, because you lay yourself open for people to accuse and disrespect you. But it's worth it. It's worth it because not too many people are too honest anymore.
I went on tour with Ricky Skaggs and his wife, Sharon White, and the White Family in 2015. It was fantastic. They're all the greatest singers of that country stuff, traditional country up into bluegrass.
It sounds kind of cliche, and a lot of people say it about our music, but I think a good place to hear our music for the first time is on vacation, or somewhere warm, on the beach or something like that.
Surrounding myself with people I enjoy being with made the sessions effortless. Everyone came prepared and ready to play. All were great musicians and they came to the studio to give everything they had.
Where do I begin with 'The Godfather?' It's like explaining why the 'Bible' is so popular. I'll always remember seeing the first one because it was the only time I went to the movies with my grandfather.
If I could be any animal I would be a pony because then I could have sex with ponies. Pony, what a funny word. Say it, pony. PO-KNEE. Now ah've made myself giddy with delight. Towards the ponies *laughs*
If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.
A lot of inspiration comes from the sounds that we are attracted to when we come across them in our experiments and may lead us into a certain direction because of inherent possibilities we hear in them.
Sometimes it's a fraught, kind of laden world of performance that I think can be really dubious, but it's also super fun to almost desecrate an instrument that for 500 years has been associated with God.
I was kicked out of middle school a few times. This guy who was kind of a d*** and a bully got hit by a car. I jumped up and went, YEAH Apparently that wasnt cool with some people cause I got kicked out.
And so there I was living in California from Brooklyn, New York, and it was this whole new world for me and I was meeting vegetarians. I thought, let me try this vegetarian thing. I got really into that.
I knew I was destined to be a rock star. I just knew it, like I've always had the power of foresight. I feel right now exactly the way I felt after I finished mixing my first solo album 'New York Groove'.
I live on the edge of Bath. It's really lovely, but its very loveliness freaks me out a bit. It's peaceful, a great antidote to the craziness of being on tour, but sometimes I feel as though I've retired.