I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.
I've never presented myself as anything less than a flawed person.
It's like soul music, isn't it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.
If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick.
You make music to move people and you don't get to pick who you move. You just don't. It's exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.
The pleasure of other people is a byproduct of the pleasure that comes from yourself so I cannot judge or look down on someone who does whatever they feel like doing.
I think a myth is created from truth.
I really love that type of music where someone can take a guitar or light instrumentation and a beautiful voice and can send me somewhere.
I think you can find yourself in life perhaps not really being the master of your own life and it is within your own will and tenacity whether you switch the roles or not.
When you get a chance to play with people - informally is one thing, but when you hook up and make something that's going to last or mean something to someone, I take it very seriously.
You run the risk of falling on your face, but, again, music is an individual pursuit - it is made to please yourself first.
Anything lower than mid-six figures is not going to get me interested in that. And honestly, I just don't want to.
I'm a very private person. What I did in the past or what somebody heard me do or has a bootleg of me doing...well, if you have a bootleg, then I did it.
There's just so little mystery left in music or film. It was all that was magical to me as a child.
I never knew Kurt to be suicidal. I just knew that he was going through a really tough time.
Working with different people and do things that normally I would not do makes the music interesting for me to continue. It keeps me alive. When I'm doing something alone, that is mine, I know how it is. But when I'm working with someone else, I also see the view from the other, and usually learn something new, try something different. This is very important to my happiness.
The ability to play with different people is infinitely fascinating to me.
Basically I'm always singing about the same stuff whether it's in a loud or quiet outfit.
You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours.
I think when you're young and you get together with a group of guys who think like you and you start to make something that moves you as a group of people and you have a common goal, that's an exciting time.
The more years you put behind you, hopefully making music that surpasses what you did before, you're playing bigger places and it kind of weirdly becomes a business.
The absence of a bass player always makes things go faster and hit harder in the high-end range.
I've always been a fan of album covers with no writing on them and have used them a lot in my own groups.
