Caffeine gives me hope. Sometimes, when I brew my wicked strong Irish black tea just perfect, about halfway through the mug I feel a clear and overwhelming feeling of optimism. It didn't surprise me when a study a few years ago implied that suicide was much less likely among coffee and tea drinkers.
If you'd asked me what I'd wanted to do five years ago, I'd have told you I wanted to be Viktor Vaughn or The Game - I would want to be a rapper with an eight ball of coke in my pocket and a wad of hundreds. Because that kind of freedom - well, perceived freedom - is where I want to be.
The funny thing is that even engineers and techs don't know what a tiny telephone connector is - people call them TT connectors. Engineers used to come by all the time and say, "Why are you called Tiny Telephone?"
The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing.
Making love to robots will probably be great one day. It's just not a viable option right now.
Analog was perfected over 70 years, though. Digital will one day be fantastic. I'm sure of it.
When I tour with a band, things get more unconscious and more automatic as the tour goes on. Music has to be like natural speech. It's probably like learning a foreign language. Thinking about the use of pronouns is not the passionate part of communicating with people.
As a studio, you have to have a niche. You have to provide a service and there has to be a reason for your being around.
One day, digital will be it. Analog will just be another oddity, and that's fine, too. I have no great misgivings about it, but there will always be something to analog. It's the smell of the tape and all that visceral, physical stuff.
Bands will always need studios. The more people there are recording at home, the more people there will be who are going to need a studio.
There's nothing like space and the ability to make unlimited amounts of noise at any time, especially in San Francisco.
I like vinyl because it's not quite random access. You have to pick up the needle, flip the record. I do think that an 18-20 minute block of music is sacred, and I can see why it's catching on. I really don't know if it will stay, but it's such a bizarre world, I think it's possible.
I was living in Gainesville, Florida, and our babysitter brought over the soundtrack to The Who's "Tommy" - not the actual record "Tommy", but the soundtrack to the movie with Elton John and Aretha Franklin. I remember hearing it for the first time and it was so confusing. It was like waves and waves of unknowable and indescribable sound coming out of the stereo.
I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize.
Ultimately, the question, "does it really matter?" is a question of humanity. If you're into the pursuit of fidelity, it's a really interesting question. Personally, I don't think digital sounds good, but that's just my own feeling.
In fact, it's in my interest to love digital recording, and I just spent a ton on a new digital recording system, so I speak from a place of heavy investment in both sides.
One thing that has happened is a revolution in digital consumer recording, and overall, that's a great thing for art, but parallel to that there's been a revolution in boutique audio companies making excellent gear.
There is definitely a nostalgia, and I am very sentimental, so I don't begrudge people for having sentimental feelings towards vinyl.
To make a live record - something that has a lot of life in it - is difficult. After slaving away for years in the studio, when I hear a No Age record or when I hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first EP or when I hear DRI or really early punk stuff, it's just so powerful, so raw - and I know how hard that is to create. It's very deceptive. It's like a Dardenne brothers film - it seems like just a handheld camera following some people around in a trailer park, but it's incredibly difficult to do that.
Usually I'm trying to get away from my discography. I don't think I could tear down everything I've done, the structures I've created - you know, like what Miles Davis did eight times in a row, which was destroy every kind of crutch or system he had for making music. That's very, very difficult. When I reflect on my catalog, I'm very proud of it, and I love it, but what I want to do now is completely different. When I don't do something different, I feel like I'm cheating - consciously or unconsciously stealing from myself.
I wish I could go out farther from my musical history. I didn't realize how hard it was until I tried to do it. All the basic tracks on Romanian Names were done in my basement, alone, without any of the self-consciousness that comes with being in the studio. It was a completely different process. And those two things definitely made the record sound different. But you want this quantum leap from record to record, and maybe if I did make a quantum leap I'd make an unlistenable album. So maybe I'm lucky that I can't pull it off.
