I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.
I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren't where their strengths lie.
Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we're not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.
I still make music. I still write music and I record music, I just don't trust music promotion [and] distribution right now enough to record a new set of diligently worked-upon compositions. I do trust the audience and the audiences very much.
It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.
I make the songs and part of making them is singing them. But what you hear is not me. It's the song. It's through me.
When you're listening to a recording, you're supposedly listening to some aspect of the past in the present as you travel slowly into the future, but you also know there's a very strong likelihood that the future of that recording, whether you made it or whether you're listening to a Led Zeppelin record, is going to continue probably far beyond where you are.
Then little writings and recordings that thankfully continue to come up. I'm in this kind of wonderful, kind of awkward, off-putting, and strange position where there's nothing I want to do more than continue to make music, but the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially.
Cities are made for enemies to destroy.
Whenever I see something that looks like it could be good - whether it's on vinyl, CD or cassette - if it's not too expensive, I'll take a chance.
One thing that the Internet has created is the sense that information is at your fingertips, when it's really only a very, very limited, specific, and slanted kind of information.
Venues are all the same, all feel the same, these generic blank spaces. I like artists like Lightning Bolt-bands that go in and kind of change things every time, play on the floor, set up in the middle of the room. They go in and they reinvent the space every time, which I feel is like the kind of thing that should just be happening.
I write a song to be recorded. And to some extent to be performed, but definitely more to be recorded than performed, because the recording will last longer than a performance.
It's nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.
The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.
You're hoping that it's going to be an extraordinary experience any time you create and/or listen to music with other people. I guess what I've been saying over the past few minutes is that it's hard to do that, to create that.
I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning. Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it.
I don't like the idea of being surrounded by hidden things; people you can't see in buildings and cars.
I don't usually read reviews. I usually read the interviews, just because I figure it's a good way to try to do them better if I ever have to do them again.
It's definitely important to be open enough to seize an opportunity when the opportunity is there.
It's O.K. to accept good fortune.
I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.
I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.
As it turns out, as an adult I can have a very unpleasant, fierce and unforgiving temper at times. But I don't think I had that when I was a kid.
I think that America in general is piratical. Every time we accept a paycheck for doing almost nothing, allowing us to live above the poverty line, we're engaging in piracy.
