I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.
A rock musician's career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.
Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that.
There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't.
At school I was an anti-magnet for women.
I've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
What I want people to recognize is that we have to keep working together and take charge because we all have the same story.
The singing tells everybody what to do musically.
As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it.
I feel like I've spent the last five years of my life on the road. It hasn't affected my songs but it's probably affected everything else about me. Obviously, the more you travel, the wilder the things that keep happening to you, the more likely it is you'll get complete strangers knocking on your hotel room door.
I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.
I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.
I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.
I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.
We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"
My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.
Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.
We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.
Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.
The secret to longevity in the music business is to change, and to be able to change. [...] An actor has to assume other people's identities. A rock star doesn't need to do that. [...] But change is important.
I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books.
