I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.
Music is about imagination. It's about thought. It's about creating something from nothing.
It can and will be a more powerful sound but the orchestra has far more potential for expressive power. When I hear a great rock band it can make me feel alive, but when I hear a great orchestra it can make me feel human.
Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit.
One hundred guitarists making lots of noise would not be something you'd want to listen to.
I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music.
I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.
Whatever works for the piece I'm thinking about is the way I write.
I'm never happy with anything.
It scares me that people are going to stop writing music. I don't mean music that has to be physically written down, but they'll stop using their brain which is without a doubt the most powerful tool that you could have in any art.
It's a mysterious thing that a whole generation of young people can come up and see and understand things that previous generations weren't able to see or understand.
It's crucial that people are on the right measure at the right time.
I think of myself of a primitivist. I have never had any of these electronic instruments and I have never had the slightest interest in using them. I use the computer as a tool, simply because it makes composing a lot faster. But I don't go on stage with a computer and make a lot of goofy sounds.
I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.
I liked rock music going back to the '60s, but I never ever had any desire to be a rock musician and when I started doing a band it was experimental music.
I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.
I'm constantly revising and updating a piece until it's finally recorded. Once it's recorded, then it's over.
I started out in theatre and I definitely have wanted to add extra musical elements to my music with both imagery and text.
There were a lot of people doing new and interesting things with rock. But I wanted to take it farther than that. My real influence was punk. I must have listened to the first Patti Smith album 300 times.
