Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was hitching, I'd be completely decked out. I used to wear this custom-made black jumpsuit, these, like, pink, knee-high platform boots, all kinds of rhinestones, lots of dangling belts and gloves.
I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.
The business of making music is changing so radically because of the Internet. It's become a lot more democratic in one respect, but in another respect there's no one left to guide and mentor young bands.
I didn't think I had much of a following in the South. I thought I was anonymous down there so I kept to the South. But I found in certain pockets that I was quite recognizable and I just hit a wig store.
As a songwriter, I was really into pulling away from the melodrama and the overdramatic type of writing that I was previously always doing. I think over time my songs have become more and more restrained.
We haven't played that many of them because all our gear was over here waiting for us when we could get here. So we didn't get to rehearse any of the new stuff, so we have planned to play 3 or 4 new ones.
I got a little lost in "Law & Order" and "Luther" and all those shows where it's basically women dying all the time, I had to stop watching that stuff because it fills me with anxiety. And I joined a gym.
It was humbling to see my brothers blowing up in music while I wasn't in the public eye, but it was also gratifying, because I'm doing what I love, and the self-esteem you get from that is so much better.
In reality, there's a limit to putting a record out yourself. When it comes to working with major record companies in the context of them owning anything, though, that will never happen. Ever. In my life.
You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.
I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
As with many things in life-what we know at 30we wish we knew at 20-what we know at 40we wish we knew at 25and so on. 'If I knew then, what I know now' is the old adage that has been said for generations.
The churches weren't going to accept me looking like a street person with long hair and faded jeans. They did not like the music I was recording. And I had no desire to preach the gospel to the converted.
The bass is just the crayon that I picked out of the box. I'd probably be writing similar stuff if I played guitar or trumpet. The pictures I want to draw I do with this crayon I chose, which is the bass.
I need them, need them to give me a kick up the arse. Otherwise I'd just be sat-in getting fat, counting me money. It's good people living on your doorstep and looking through your bins. Gives you energy.
We spent last night listening to Liverpool football team on the radio, wanting them to win so badly. Paul supports Liverpool. He was Everton for a while because of his family - but it's all Liverpool now.
But by taking the time away, getting myself off the treadmill, and just slowing down and learning, I felt I had so much more to give back. And maybe that was something that needed to happen for all of us.
As a kid I was, constantly terrorized with the idea of Armageddon and the Antichrist and things like that and as I got older, I realized that, something like Antichrist is the collective disbelief in God.
Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.
We were playing shows still when we wrote 'Phoebe' and 'Rock All Night.' We got to test those songs in a live setting, so it was nice recording them and knowing which ones really resonated with the crowd.
I might've set out to write a particular song about a particular girl, but my experience will run out after four lines, so instead of getting obsessed with the girl, I write about the clothes I'm wearing.
There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were a very, very political, and they literally hit you over the head with a hammer. U2 sometimes can hit you over the head with a rubber hammer.
I don't believe in astrology. It's a lot of crap. I just think that's another thing you should throw out the window. Mysticism. Cheap. It's amazing that people still hang on to that after all these years.
I was a producer and rapper before Linkin Park. Once the band took off, it was the center of my focus. A couple of years ago, I started missing doing straight-up hip hop, and that's when Fort Minor began.
My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail.
I have such an admiration for John [Lennon], like most people. But to be the guy who wrote with him, well that's enough. Right there you could retire and go, 'Jesus I had a fantastic life. Take me, Lord.'
If you're in music, you're in music, and if you're in music you just want to keep making records and playing. That's what it's about, isn't it? At least, that's what I always thought it was about, anyway.
I think what made John Lennon so exciting as an artist is that, like Dylan and other musicians with a truly important musical legacy, he had several faces, personas that changed over time as he developed.
Those albums are so important to me because, for the first time, I was making my own music, paying for it, finding strengths in it, and going through the process of finding the right music for the record.
You can find the greatest sound of all time, and someone's going to squash it down to a tiny little earphone anyway or play it through the computer, and that is a big thing people have to think about now.
There's an awful lot of white British kids who have never really gone hungry, always had a roof to live under but at the same time are desperately unhappy. It's not total poverty, just a poverty of ideas.
I'd say that after my father passed my writing changed, it went deeper. Most would say 'matured' but I don't think I'd use that word in relation to my progress. I think 'change' is a little more accurate.
There's a woman in the United States who predicted the plane we were traveling on would crash. Now, a lot of people would like to think we were scared into saying a prayer. What we did actually--we drank.
I think if you're going to remake a film it should be something that was a good idea, but wasn't executed well. There isn't anything I would like to remake. I have too many of my own ideas I want to make.
Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.
Like I can't cry for myself so I will let this song take all of the things inside I can't let anyone else see and offer it up, as if the sound were some kind of god, and my pain is some kind of sacrifice.
Whatever I was doing, even when I was at school, I never repressed anything that I felt. I wasn't flamboyant; I was actually quite reticent most of the time. But if I felt I had to do something, I did it.
There are kids out there that are into Iron Maiden and others who are strictly into industrial music, but they come for the same reason; they all like us and they different things out of the band's music.
A lot of journalists like to suck up to celebrities, and then as soon as they're a safe distance away at their computers, they take shots. But that's the way society has become, especially in pop culture.
I'm 45 years old. I used to be a club girl, but that's not my world anymore. That doesn't mean I can't make music that excites. I think it's inspiring to see an artist you grew up with take another crack.
What I love about music, when you can look at something and be like, "Wow, what's this all about?" You can't really picture what these people look like - is it one guy, or a band making music in a garage?
Practice, practice, practice. Practice until you get a guitar welt on your chest...if it makes you feel good, don't stop until you see the blood from your fingers. Then you'll know you're on to something!
My memory bank has overflowed out of control forever. I'm surprised my smile hasn't killed me yet. I have lived an indescribable joyful, adventurous, musical dream life and it just gets better every year.
I feel like that for the next album, we're going to know what we're doing for each song even more than what we did for this one, just because we'll have really fleshed them out as a band before recording.
My only means of self defense is to wiggle my eye and feign being a salamander. It has saved my life but once I was partially eaten by a bald eagle who thought I was a salamander. Hence, my skills. Hence.
It's easy for guys to listen to another guy for support, but if it's a female, they seem to shy away from it, like they don't want to be a sucker, you know what I'm saying? So we kind of got to go harder.
I juice a lot; I get as much protein as I can, because being a vegan, there isn't much protein. But that's pretty much it. I just drink lots of water, too. I'll have a protein shake as well every morning.
You know, on the road, I never miss a meal. I eat five, six, seven times a day, depending on when I wake up and when I got to sleep. I never miss a training day. I always get my four days out of my seven.
Without just cause of reason, without legal or moral justification, and without a thread of proof that Iraq directly threatens the security of the United States, the Bush administration has headed to war.
One of our biggest pet peeves is listening to bands that use harmony guitars for the sake of it. If you can't figure out how do something different than Maiden, UFO, or even Boston, then what's the point?