Your youth is the most important thing you will ever have. It's when you will connect to music like a primal urge, and the memories attached to the songs will never leave you. Please hold on to everything. Keep every note, mix tape, concert ticket stub, and memory you have of music from your youth. It'll be the one thing that might keep you young, even if you aren't anymore.
Don't let your cool stand in the way of being soulful. Life is too short. Too short to hate. Too short to judge. Too short not to live for. Don't let anything or anyone get the best of you or your heart and mind. If you are going down... go down swinging, singing, and loving.
I really enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy harmonies and I enjoy hearing the organic side of production because I have to do so much non- organic for a living for other artists, it's just a break for me, for my ears and it confuses people that think my music is supposed to sound like the stuff I do for my day job, but that's just people that don't know me.
When you write a song that is so personal to yourself, it's really hard to picture anybody else understanding it when you're singing it. There's things that are very broad and universal topics. Those are the songs that might work for others.
When your 18th, 19, 20 years old like we were at that time, its just like anyone else, you look at like Silverchair and bands like that that are super young and sound extremely derivative of bands that were out at that current moment. As they sounded like 'Nirvana in pajamas' as we called them, we sounded like Bon Jovi and Skid Row and Motley Crue, because we were only influenced by what was out at the time because we were so young
I guess the internet and the power of people finding things out for themselves is great.
I would have never thought in a million years that I would appeal to an Avril fan. But I'm glad that I do because a lot of them aren't jaded or cynical.
I'm a big vinyl listener, I'm a big audiophile. I have a really nice stereo set up at home with a hi-fi and really nice turntable and it's a big deal to me to listen to music in it's purest form like that.
I'm not stupid, I realise selling it is not as important as it used to be that way, I think it's more important to get your music out there and if people want to hear it an mp3 form or whatever I'm fine with that, I just don't enjoy the sound of it at home for personal taste.
It's just for some reason I've got just as many fans that only like me when I'm yelling or being funny or whatnot, and jumping up and down on a pogo stick while playing a fancy lead guitar. And they get mad when I sing a heartfelt emotional song and if there's an album full of them.
I think my favorite part about being on the road is that it's like a boys' club.
