I'm a rock-and-roll drummer, so my job is to create chaos.
Usually if someone starts making universal claims, I tune right on out.
When it comes down to intuition, when it comes down to gut feelings about whether a song is right, you can get distracted with words, rationalization. There's nothing wrong with music school, but part of music school has to be the ability to forget all of it, too.
I've got childhood friends who are working for non-profit foundations, or who are running for state senate and doing things that actually do fight evil in this world. And what am I doing? I bang on some drums in a rock band. I try to tell myself that by doing that, I'm fighting evil - which is completely absurd. Music is not equipped in any way to fight against anything. Other than, I guess, it could fight against silence.
I play drums, and I'd recommend it to anyone, except maybe your neighbors. It's great exercise - physical, mental, emotional, and social. It takes deep concentration but also activates concentration. If you're doing it right, it's always just a little harder than what you can actually pull off.
There's part of me that feels a privilege not to do music, but to do what everybody should be allowed to do, which is to do what you're driven to do.
I have music in my head; I can't help it. You can put a gun to my head and it's not going to go away. The privilege is that I'm not being prevented from following that.
What's great about going on tour is that it immediately unburdens me of those self-centered misconceptions. Because suddenly, with these songs you've been obsessed with for months, you're playing them for hundreds of people.
I'm not unswayed by the opinions of others. I actually really value that, the idea that you can feel things the way somebody else might feel them is a really big part of doing music for me.
It's very heartening to see people who I used to do music with still doing it.
It's weird to me to even say, "I wrote this song." I never feel like I wrote it; I feel like I heard it.
I've found that writing and playing music has so little to do with will, and so much to do with just finding what's there waiting for you.
It's amazing to think that there must be this river of ideas constantly rushing inside of a person, and once you've somehow found a path into it, then it's just there, whether you will it to be or not.
When I'm playing best, I'm just thinking about the music, just interacting with what my bandmates are playing.
It's a great privilege to be able to play that much. When you play a lot, you can be really detail-oriented.
My projects are just side effects of what I obsess over, what I chat about, what random things pop into my head, what I dream at night.
I love love. Growing up, I always thought it was a state, and I'd wait for it to appear. Now I think it's an activity, a skill, something you strive to create. A constant conversation between emotion and imagination and flesh.
In American commercials in the past year or two, I don't know, the singers all sound like they're whining and the music's all melancholy. It's sort of like, I hear these commercials and it makes me feel sad, you know? Like - for instance, my barley tea is gone. Now, there's music out there that encourages you, when your barley tea has run out, to just sort of sit there and be like "My tea ran out. Oh, man." And just be slouching. So we wanted to make music that when your tea runs out, instead you're like, "I'm gonna go get some more tea!" You know? It just gives you the energy.
Our music was meant to be motivational, we thought it would be interesting - when you have a breakup, or when you have hard times with your honey, you know, hard times in life, you can feel sad about it, or you can sometimes, take a dark time and make it, like, One lumen nicer, you know what I mean?
The only way the band could make any money was by going on tour. But going on tour meant we had to get time off from our jobs, and we couldn't get enough time off to make enough money from touring to survive, so the only way to try was to quit our jobs. None of us had a job that was so wonderful that we were just dying to keep it.
When it's time to write a new song, anything that you thought you understood last time is pretty much pulverized.
Pop music is the one genre that isn't a genre. If the kids like it, then that's what defines it as pop music. Pop music is just something new.
I'm always looking to disprove what I think I know for sure. I call that learning.
Almost everything that gets called "universal truth" or "common sense" is actually cultural. And too easily twisted into justifications for all kinds of behavior.
I try not to think about the drums themselves. If I do, I'll end up hitting myself in the head with a drumstick, or sustaining some weird injury.
