My whole access into culture was violent. Violence is something I understand. Don't like it, don't condone it, but I sure understand where it comes from.
I see violence in myself; I've done some pretty violent things in my lifetime and I've been around some pretty severe violence all the way up to homicide.
I enjoy helping. I like doing benefits and things like that, but don't feel the need to be thanked or even meet the people I am doing the benefit for.
When you start thinking as far as what's a good photo, unfortunately everything starts looking like a good photo.
When you put yourself in environments that continually test you, that's where all the good stories come from. That's where the jokes come from is from the shitty parts.
I'm a recognizable person and some people feel the need for some reason to take me to task. You're really messing with the wrong person on that one.
I'm always looking, people are always presenting and I have found that every year of my life there's been great bands. All over the world, all the time. So when someone goes, "Music sucks now!" I'll go, "I don't think so. Not over at my house."
My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.
I listen to blues music a lot and that's a good person feeling bad and celebrating that pain by releasing it in that kind of joyous fashion.
I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me.
What you do for yourself is one thing. What you do for others is something else entirely.
I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.
All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time.
For me, speaking to anyone - on a stage, in an elevator - I am looking for impact and connection. The same goes for writing.
Most of the writers I like just intimidate and humble me but in that there's a good deal of inspiration to be had as well.
When I write lyrics, it's only when I'm angry or hurt or sad. So lyrically it's never really easy going. And the music is always really intense.
I don't need music for the good times. I don't have that kind of need. Music doesn't serve me like that.
With writing, there are multiple drafts. On stage, there is one take. I do a lot of preparation for shows, so, for the most part, what you hear me say is pretty much what I wanted to get at.
I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me.
Retirement in another country is your body is too racked with pain and your hands are too arthritic from the life in the rice patty fields, so you can't work anymore.
I recycle and try to be nice to the earth. But flora and fauna have always interested me, and it is because of so many years of summer camp and growing up in DC with Rock Creek Park fairly near me, or Glover Park; I lived in Glover Park for a while and that park was in my backyard.
We should treat each other better. Why in the hell would you still have racism? This ancient, moronic hatred? Why does our foreign policy have to always involve so much death and so much death of innocent people as a matter of course, to the point to where no one bothers to say anything. I guess a lot of people don't want to move forward. It's frustrating at times.
The music kind of takes care of itself because we've done all that as preproduction in the practice room. So by the time it gets onstage, each song has about one hundred hours of way too much mothering gone into it. So when you see us play live, that is the product of ninety days of practice, over a year of writing, listening to demos on the weekends after practice.
People who keep a large snake in their apartment building, which happens quite a bit, all of a sudden, within two summers, have a 14-foot animal that's eating adult rabbits, and needs quite a bit of room and quite a bit of heat. That's the animal that gets put in the back of a pick-up truck and dumped into the Florida Everglades or the city lake, or just left on a doorstep - again, it's quite often the animal that suffers.
Human beings should not be reduced to a state to where they almost get into a fight over a small bar of soap.
