I always loved art shows at schools. My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It's some of my favorite art... It's more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.
I'm a musician. I'm not, like, a personality. I've never really pretended to perform that kind of function.
If we look at the fact that record covers are essentially advertisements for the music, we acknowledge a function and purpose to draw in the prospective buyer.
I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.
I didn't go to high school. I never felt connected to people my age.
Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.
In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.
Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.
Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air.
When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the '50s/'60s generation was so dominant.
There's never any pressure on the music having to be something.
I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial.
I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most.
There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.
I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it's usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank.
Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig.
Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.
You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you'll start walking pretty weird.
I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.
Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.
The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing.
I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.
I love British humor. It's just so - surreal.
You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.
We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.
There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.
There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.
The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.
The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.
Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side.
