The times I have tried to get close to someone resulted in me feeling threatened and weak.
My feelings for you shame me into silence.
Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold onto something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain.
Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.
I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.
When I am in Africa, I always have the feeling that it's where everything started. When I am in New York, I know it is where everything ended up.
I wasn't playing the music, the music was playing me... and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn't wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud... You cannot fool an audience.
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.
The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power.
