We live in ugly times.
Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.
All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.
The idea of making music from an imaginary culture was to give ourselves a set of restrictions and parameters within which to work. Otherwise, we might have just gone on all kinds of creative detours, some of which might have been interesting. But better we confine ourselves to something.
Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional.
I have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do.
People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper.
People use irony as a defense mechanism.
People in Latin America... love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.
Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.
A dissection of music perception and creation that starts slowly and inexorably builds to a grand finish. I loved reading that listening to music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else--and playing music uses even more! Despite illuminating a lot of what goes on this book doesn't "spoil" enjoyment- it only deepens the beautiful mystery that is music.
One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.
It's not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.
Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.
Another Elvis will not come along. He got wasted, but it's alright.
Physical contact is a human necessity.
A lot of that worked itself out in the recording.
Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm's length. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.
There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything.
If I'm feeling that I have an angle or something to say or something where in a way I'm having a conversation with myself, that's immensely pleasurable.
I'd been keeping tour diaries, and especially when I go somewhere where I felt the experience might be interesting, like Eastern Europe or South America or whatever, where the whole perception of what I was doing there and stuff that I was seeing and music I was hearing, I could put all that into a diary.
A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good.
I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here.
Some things, I feel like no, I never could have the depth of experience of their own music and culture - but sometimes if I'm collaborating with somebody, they're interested in me bringing my own stuff into their thing, and sometimes that works.
I'm being probably naïve, but I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it's a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don't have any connection to you or relevance to you.
