It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians.
When you create a fence, you keep people out, but you also limit your mobility.
I was never afraid on stage. That's where I was the least afraid. I could just do what I do and I had the amplification and the lights.
I've never had a mentor. I've always wanted one. I'm actually really disappointed that nobody took my under their wing.
If you've been in the art world for more than eight years, you realize another generation is making the exact same work as the previous generation - but treating it like it's never been done before. It becomes very cyclical very quickly.
The Greeks really believed in history. They believed that the past had consequences and that you might be punished for the sins of your father. America, and particularly New York, runs on the idea that history doesn't matter. There is no history. There is only the never-ending present. You don't even have your family because you moved here to get away from them, so even that idea of personal history has been cut at the knees.
There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle.
The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town.
Now we're in an age of singles. It's actually always been more about singles for most of music history.
I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts" as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet.
I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward.
An album for me as a teenager in the '70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. Maybe one of the songs is really poppy and you listen to it on the radio as a hit single and then more of the world is about to find out about this artist by buying the record.
Today, MTV doesn't play videos anymore, but YouTube certainly has become the next MTV.
Looking back, [R.E.M.]videos, by in large, have always been art films. I'm thinking of "Losing My Religion." That's a landmark piece.
There’s a great scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974] that I’m obsessed with: Sally is being chased by Leatherface with a chainsaw... And she runs into thorn bushes. And she’s getting tangled up in it because she’s running fast... But Sally needs to move slowly in order to get through the bushes - she will get farther faster by going slowly because her hair and clothes won’t get tangled and caught. There’s something really beautiful about understanding that, while someone’s chasing you with a chainsaw, you have to move more slowly in order to get away.
There is a value to moving more slowly through a story.
There's also something sexual about watching the nubile girl in terror. But you do take on her fear as your own.
I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time.
I'm really much better at asking questions than answering them, since asking questions is like a constant deflection of oneself.
We've come under the influence of television, where in all honesty we can follow a show that could just get cancelled midway through the season and the entire plotline never resolves itself.
It's just as political, what you do in the bedroom is just as political as what you do in public.
I don't think secrets are a bad thing. I think there's this idea that everything needs to be transparent in order for it to be free.
I like to be alone, I mean, I really love to be alone more than anything else, and I don't really like to talk about myself to death, and I don't like to share too much, and I don't really have dreams of extreme fame or even extreme respect.
It's hard for me to figure out where I want to be. But it's definitely in New York. I feel like New York throws different challenges at you and you can be more creative.
I like change. I've never really had much consistency in my life, you know, from everyday work to my living situation to whether or not I'm going to be in L.A. The one constant thing in my life is my friends and family, which is all I need
