I was part of a generation that changed the world - and it was taken over by poseurs.
We're the worst band in America... That makes us the best.
Being in a rock band is just an excuse not to get a job
I dont think we're the type of band people look at and say, 'I want to grow up to be just like that'. We're like a train wreck.
I think God is the most unexplored territory in rock and roll music.
Heavy metal is a universal energy -- it's the sound of a volcano. It's rock, it's earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand.
Sometimes people just like being around each other, and good things come out of that.
I've always been spiritual but I've never had a proper context, and it took me awhile to find the proper context. It's hard to realize you can have any kind of relationship with God you want...and so I now have a punk rock relationship with God.
Jesus teaches us to forgive and I've got to trust him on that one.
I really think it's a white, bourgeois idea to pretend that you don't have influences. It seems to be the obsession strictly of white people in college.
It makes me crazy to think that somebody might attack my city or any other city.
I know how stupid people can be. I've played in front of 5,000 people that bought a ticket to my concert, and some guy who's bought a ticket decides he's going to throw a bottle at my head. That's a simple act of stupidity. That's not even defiance.
When alternative music - which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of where white rock is headed - becomes either too cute or too manufactured, that's just really not good.
It's what the mainstream does - they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.
The deeper I get into my life as a musician, I'm discovering that it becomes less and less about other people, and more about what I want to do. And that's a good place to be.
There is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic.
Calm, open debate, and logical thought drive strength to its maximum effectiveness.
People try to make a big deal, like I don't want to play my old songs. That's not it. I don't want to play my old songs if that's my only option. That's a different thing.
As long as you have faith, you're willing to try to take another chance. God wants you to amble toward the right spot on the horizon. The idea is that you're willing to get up and keep moving toward that light.
My mother and I parting company at four years old is a recurring theme; although it's not symbolically necessarily present, it's present in all my relationships.
The ideology of the Smashing Pumpkins was ultimately more valuable than the music of the Smashing Pumpkins. That's what critics can't put their finger on.
I mean there's certainly a lot of progressive rock and metal that exists at the underground level, which has its own vitality, as it should. But it seems to have lost its ability to really charge up the hill.
I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.
I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.
I don't have any sentimental notion about how people are going to remember me.
