When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn't even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.
My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.
Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.
The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.
Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.
Different boards do different things to the sound that's coming through them. An old Neve desk does embellish it in a way that makes it sound sort of bigger or warmer. It doesn't change the performance but it does enhance the way that it sounds.
It's good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that's better than you'd imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.
I never needed much, and I never thought I'd get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.
I had long hair since I was 17 years old. It was time for me to let go. I hated being the guy at the wedding in a suit with a ponytail.
You can make yourself the greatest singer in the world or the best drummer in the world with the aid of technology.
A place like Sound City, which was just a big, beautiful room where you would hit record and capture the sound of the performer - a place like that isn't necessarily in demand anymore.
No one has any faith in the tape anymore - everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don't. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.
'In Utero' was the first time I'd made an album that reached into the dark side. I remember the conflict and the uncertainty. I remember all those things when I hear 'Pennyroyal Tea.'
The Nirvana unplugged album was something we'd always knew we were capable of doing, but it was just a matter of doing it right.
Chicago gave me more music than any other city in America.
I was at a New Year's Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, 'I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,' and I actually meant it.
I know a lot of people who wouldn't be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don't understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.
I don't want to say that most rock bands live these formulaic biography existences - but they kinda do. There's always a divorce. There's always an OD. There's always a bad business manager.
I love being a drummer but I love being a musician in general and I love the Foo fighters.
We're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing.
In a way, as much as we love to be a big, loud rock band, the acoustic album was a lot easier to make than the rock records. I think because it was brand new territory for the band.
My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.
Once I got into punk rock, I started mail-ordering albums, because a lot of the record stores in my area didn't carry the punk bands from England or Sweden or Chicago or Los Angeles
I'm told that my blood sugar level was twelve times the legal limit - I was sweating honey.
The late '60s and the '70s, a lot of this really beautiful equipment was being made and installed into studios around the world and the Neve boards were considered like the Cadillacs of recording consoles. They're these really big, behemoth-looking recording desks; they kind of look like they're from the Enterprise in Star Trek or something like that. They're like a grayish color, sort of like an old Army tank with lots of knobs, and to any studio geek or gear enthusiast it's like the coolest toy in the world.
