Start with the titles, and then build the music that goes with them.
My favorite sounds are the high, spacey ones that are very ambient.
I don't go out much to see bands. I prefer to be on stage.
It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.
Commercial record has never interested me. It's amazing I was in a band like The Police that had such phenomenal commercial success. Part of what made The Police what it was was that we didn't all come in with obvious mainstream musical tastes. We were a rock band and somehow we had to make rock music, but it was informed by a lot of things outside of the mainstream for sure.
I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.
You don't want to be so far off the planet that you come out with something that doesn't make sense to anybody.
What you aim for, in the first place, is to be as good as you can possibly be. This is what I do, and I'm going to try to be the best in the world.
I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.
I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating.
It's exciting to see if you can create something that sounds, at least to your own ears, exciting.
You're on the stage and you've got all those people yelling at you, so you better be right in the moment, reacting to that. It's completely live and organic. Even 20 years later, it's the same thing. You may be even better on your instrument. Hopefully, you are.
'Triboluminescence' is actually a scientific world meaning striking something and creating light from dark. I thought it was a great word and that is was a very apt metaphor for making music - or any creative act, really. We all start in the dark and have to create light.
I think we are coming to a new era where people will record much faster.
For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.
The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.
I always have a guitar with me. Actually, I've got several, I play every day. And I enjoy it. I'm never very far away from them. I swear I only ever get a couple days when I'm away from a guitar, and I never like it! There's always one close by, and I play every day. Or I'll be working on something in the studio and play around a bit. It's an extension of me, really.
What I wanted to do was play the guitar but I don't like instrumental rock. I think it is tripe.
You come off of this screaming audience of many, many thousands of people. I used to find it very weird. You have two choices. Either you can stay and pump flesh with hundreds of people after the show, which really gets old, or you can come off stage, get into the car, and go straight out the back and away, back to the hotel.
Coming from the era of vinyl you could argue that everything went wrong in the music business the moment we went digital. The day the first CD came out, it all went downhill in the music industry. Digital destroyed everything.
I actually think I play better now than Ive ever played.
There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.
Im better for it and I prefer to keep things simple and see what sounds I can get out of my head and hands rather than relying on a sound that someone else created.
Usually, the best thing is when the band goes to the bar and gets the corner table, we sit there like kings, and then they bring people to us. It's just rock 'n' roll. It's stupid, really.
