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My generation's apathy. I'm disgusted with it. I'm disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.
I'm just old enough to be able to say I got those very first Beatles records right as they were hitting America. My father brought them home. It was definitely the earliest musical influence on my life, and still one of the greatest.
I was lucky enough to meet someone when I was about 46 and had my first child when I was 48, so I got started late, but I also got all that other stuff out of the way and was at a point where I could be a consistent presence at home.
One thing about when I came back into Dinosaur that was really cool was that pretty much anybody that J. was working with who had a long-term relationship with J. were people I really liked and that I actually may have already known.
In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.
Occasionally, something will happen that will change your opinion of someone irrevocably, that will shatter the ideal you've built up around a person and force you to see them for the fallible and human creature that they really are.
I do have a lot of sexual imagery in my performance. But I don't think it's ever encouraging anyone to have sex. I think I just show my own sexuality, but I don't think I've ever really written about having sex or anything like that.
I guess the best thing about having a successful record like this is, like, I know I'm at least good for another five years, like, before everyone starts to like - all the haters start to come out again. And that's really what it is.
I vaguely remember in the '90s when Calvin Klein started making unisex CK1. Don't worry about whether it's made for men or women. Listen, we all like to put mum's clothes on sometimes. What's important is that it feels right for you.
The main thing in making your own music is that it's an expression of someone's personality and being. That's what people want to hear, and you can't really teach that - that's just something that comes out. Teaching just hones that.
When people start writing songs for award shows, there's a very limited palette you can use. You end up not sounding like you. You end up sounding like somebody else. You end up getting what the record company thinks they can market.
The thing about Matt Cameron is he has made us 1000 times a better band than we've ever been. He's such a freight train on drums and such a cool individual as a man that it makes us better as a band, and we are now complete with him.
Theres no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, Im playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.
American sports are quite masculine. And football - although it's still played by men all over the world - football compared to American football is quite feminine in its artistry. And there's no padding. It's America's loss, though.
I used to go round to Aunt Mimi's house and John would be at the typewriter, which was fairly unusual in Liverpool. None of my mates even knew what a typewriter was. Well they knew what it was but they didn't hae one. Nobody had one.
I never, ever wanted to be the Rolling Stones. Bless their hearts, but I dont necessarily want to go on doing the same old thing for the next 10, 20 years... I could see how easy it is to get into that rut, the whole touring mindset.
The homosexual community wants me to be gay. The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I'm the journalist who's going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!
I really enjoy what I do, and who I'm with and where I am. Having said that, I'm not really a person of habit, because what I do in my job is travel around the world and play concerts to people, and occasionally do very weird things.
You know, we'd just had a birthday, he was... you know, he still had a future out of him, and all I can is he was just one of the most beautiful people in the world... a very gifted man, and it's a loss to the world, not just for us.
Favorite country singer of all time... Hank Williams... Well, then there's Willie Nelson. Can I have three? I can't do one. Then if I have three, I'll need five. Hank Williams for sure. Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
We live in very volatile times. And it is super necessary that all of us resist this move toward the militarization and establishment of a more and more authoritarian regime, not just in the United States but in Europe and elsewhere.
I've always covered some Dylan songs. I do one or two. And I do them because they're great songs. You know some people cover songs they wish they could have written, not me. I like to cover songs I know I could not have ever written.
If the Police could do a reunion... One of the biggest jerks I ever met was Sting. If he can do it, then anyone can do it. It's not that big a deal. And the Eagles! They did it! They severely hated each other. It's just rock and roll
When I was younger, I went through the windshield of a car ,and my hair didn't grow back right. I had been wearing scarves occasionally, and I decided that I didn't want to deal with wigs and things, so I just stumbled onto my thing.
You have to save the habitat, you have to save the population - not individual animals. What you want to save is the foundation, the basic infrastructure from which resources are produced. You can't save Fifi and Boo-Boo and Thumper.
Sometimes we and the members of Coldplay have an orgy together, (Martin) insists we don't invite any women, but I always invite a few. Usually I sing Fake Plastic Trees while he reams me from behind *Laughs* It wears me out *laughs*.
Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it
I could come home, and I would spend the rest of the night just lying on the floor or the sofa listening to albums. It was like a movie to me. I still do, really, and doing the radio show ensures that I'll be sitting there listening.
Virgil Donati is clearly the best drummer to come along in the music scene in quite some time. He is extremely unique and has embraced an original sound that has given him a signature that is unmistakable and impossible to duplicate.
When playing any song in front of an audience, you're watching them experience it, and it changes. In a lot of ways, it's almost like the music is just the background buzz to what's happening between you and the audience in the room.
I don't think that having a family changes the way we tour as much as it just changes the personal perspective on wanting to get finished with the tour, or the reason you've got to go out and bring home the bacon, that kind of stuff.
It's very cool for me to be able to get in an airplane and fly for fourteen hours and show up in a place I never thought I'd ever be and have kids in the same room singing these songs I'd written so far away. To me, that's so surreal.
Sometimes, writing songs is like waiting in for deliveries. They give you a window, and your washing machine is going to show up, whether the window is the album or something you're thinking, like, 'This thing is going to come to me.'
Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.
What's important to me is love, especially that. What's important to me is growing and evolving. But ultimately, what's important to me is being real and being authentic. I've spent enough time in my life holding poses, playing roles.
The fact that our message and my lyrics can have a positive impact on someone's life is really astounding. It definitely makes me appreciate what I do even more because I'm not just doing it for self-gain, I'm doing it to help others.
Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll.
That's the real endeavor: to try to create that direct conduit from the pure consciousness of your creative voice to the person who's a craftsman who can go into the world and consistently deliver new things worth paying attention to.
I'd been going though his trash. He knocked me down. I was glad to see him, even though he was banging my head against the sidewalk. Afterwards these bums come over and say, 'Did he get much money?' I say, 'Money'? That was Bob Dylan.
I used to draw stickmen with star glasses when I was at school. I didn't realise that would end up being me! The whole idea was that the glasses had mirrors, and if a youngster looked at me, they'd see themselves. Everybody is a star.
I'm tired of being around men all the time. I'm going to start a band called Skirt with three girls and I'll play the guitar and sing backing vocals in drag. I went window shopping when I was in New York, saw a lot of amazing dresses.
What's missing is the music. I'd like to rant on and on about the music, the mechanics of it. It's what I think about 90 per cent of the day. I don't think about getting high all the time. I guess I do think about sex a lot, though...
There weren't even cell phones when we started Garbage, we'd have to pull over to the side of the road and use a payphone to call the venue to make sure you knew where you were going and now of course everything is completely changed.
I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.
To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don't like or don't get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.
What I appreciate about Sleater-Kinney is that we did six records, and they all felt different. It was a band that was able to encapsulate different sensibilities because we were focusing on it as music and art and not as a statement.
A band like Depeche Mode would go out and record them hitting a trash can with a steel rod or something and recording it. And that would be one of their sounds of the drums. I love the creativeness of that kind of really raw sampling.
When I learned to play music, I was listening to blues music. And all the blues music I liked was super simple and stripped down. And then all the hip hop I liked was super simple and stripped down and we always heard that connection.
If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.
I can predict with some sense of certainty how life will feel in a month. I can with the same logic remember with the same element of reality or truth what life was like a month ago. All perspectives on the past are entirely relative.