I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.
What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. For the most part at the moment we get less information for slightly less money - though we could be getting a lot more.
What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open.
We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable.
The most common music that you hear anywhere in the world now basically has its roots in that union that happened in the last century, or in the century before that. That kind of music that's groove or beat oriented just didn't exist in lots of cultures before that.
On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.
I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit.
I've been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I've learned to resist that.
I'm very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.
The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.
The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?
Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.
Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life.
Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.
I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing.
I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?
It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.
I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.
It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.
If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.
The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.
The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.
The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying.
Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.
