I would never talk to a girl in a bar, like a pick-up thing. But I could talk to anyone if they wore a t-shirt of a band I like.
People make maps of all the places I've mentioned. I knew that those people were out there. I wanted to create something for them.
There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.
There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London, so I think we've tapped into some of that. Maybe because of the way the press works or whatever, they have extremely knowledgeable music fans over there. People who will sit there and talk to you about some record that came out in 1967 out of Memphis that you've never heard before.
Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.
I think the biggest thing - and this I think is true of songs but also of movies and books and art in general - is when you have this moment where you hear a song or whatever and you say, "Hey, I've felt that exact way as a human being," and there's no easy way to describe it.
There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.
People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.
Sometimes people come up and say, "You have this line in this song and it meant a lot to me." You don't always remember that line as the one. You're putting part of your human being on the page so people are going to have different responses - the other humans are going to connect with different parts.
I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?
When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.
One of the things is my process requires a lot of repetition. I can probably drive people crazy because I'm interested in playing a song twenty times in a row.
The Replacements are the foundation for a lot of what came after in alternative and college rock. Let It Be is their best record and has the most diverse collection of songs. Some pop stuff, some heavy stuff, and some real moments of beauty like 'Sixteen Blue' and 'Androgynous.' It's a record I always go back to.
Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.
I'm able to draw outside my own personal experiences. No one wants to hear the song about what I really did today, which is go get coffee and clean my apartment.
It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.
Springsteen on that record started writing less about having your wind in your hair and turning the radio up and more about being dragged down by adult things. Regular people trying to get ahead. A little less mythical and romantic, and more real. It's a really spectacular record for that reason.
One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.
Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head.
Heaven Is Whenever - the Christian version of reward, the ultimate reward of heaven. I guess what I'm trying to say is this is happening every day. We're blessed always. There is struggle and there is suffering in our lives, but understanding that is part of our lives - a part that just is. Suffering is a part of the joy of life.
If we enjoy what we're doing, we shouldn't really need a break. It's fun for us to play music. It's our livelihood, but I don't look at it as a job. It doesn't seem to me to be a problem to constantly be doing this.
When we started the band, I was really like, "We just want to make a lot of records" - not quite unlike Guided By Voices' schedule. I've always thought that our live thing is what we do best, and having a really robust, big catalog makes for the most interesting live band - especially with people, at this point, traveling to see us night after night. For us to have almost 100 songs to pull from is a really cool thing. The sets can be different. They can be invigorating on an intellectual level. I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.
Ray Cappo never tried to convert me into a Krishna, although one of his cohorts probably did. I think it was just about being wrapped up in this thing. Hardcore, at one point, meant everything to me. Now you look back, and I still think it's cool, but to some extent I grew out of it. Other things became a bigger priority for me.
I think when you are doing a song you're trying to give people enough details that they connect.
In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone.
