I'd rather be somewhere building a house, if I knew how. The whole idea of being a professional artist is like a demeaning kind of thing.
If the only thing that you want to do is make money - if that's your whole motivation - I think you're lying to yourself. If the only motivation you have is to make money and make it, what's making it? Oh, you get a yacht or an island. Well, you're going to need someone to be on that island. You're going to need people, one way or another.
I deteriorate. I might tell you something one day and then something else another day. You fold in on yourself and that's why this whole artistry thing is the devil. It's evil. I hope I don't succumb to it.
I was not in touch with reality. Growing up, I was being shielded without my knowing it, because even all the way up to the age of 15, I made these paper basketball men and played with them, like action figures.
Actually, my ideal life would be to have an evergreen tree farm and, every December, I'd load them up and just stand out on the street and sell Christmas trees.
Sometimes I wish it were a simpler world. I love and hate people. When I say I hate people, I really truly mean it. Sometimes I think everyone should be dead, that the animals would be better off without people. But sometimes I go into the square and I look at all the people passing me by and it fulfills me -as long as they don't bother me. As long as they just walk past and don't ask me for anything, it's fine. I almost wish I could think about it in a mundane way.
One of my struggles is that I'm a glutton. There's always those very simple, long, old-ass things, but they're very real to me, and I'm sitting in them, and they're swirling in my mind all the time. I tell people about it and they think, "Why don't you just go and make some money, go get a big-screen TV, or look at the Internet." Or they say, "Go create some introspective art." I just want to explode. I don't know how everybody else is able to walk around so calm. It's amazing to me when I see people walking so calmly down the street. I envy them, but I also kind of hate them.
What I'm trying to do is paint a picture of an atypical human being going through all of the existential struggles, but all the while realizing the carnality and small things, because I like minutiae a lot. All the while knowing that it's a forest - knowing that none of it means anything. I think if more people understood that, they would just go ahead and kill themselves like they're gonna do anyway, but do it quickly as opposed to hanging out and using up resources. Don't just sit around criticizing other people and wasting time. I do that, but I'm not really skilled in any other way.
You got this new breed of hipster chicks and hipster men that don't understand anything about sacrifice. They didn't lay it on the line. People like Cat Power, Tom Waits, they are the last of the beats, the real true philosophers.
I heard Tom Waits in this kinky shop on Belmont Street in Chicago. Considering the way I was raised, they were such obscure voices, but their music saved my life - I didn't know who I was before I heard Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
Music didn't really occur to me. Michael Jordan and Batman were my favorite two entities then. Michael Jackson was there, but I didn't really get into Bob Dylan, for instance, until I was in my 20s. The record I heard of his that got me interested in singing was Knocked Out Loaded, which is what many people consider to be his worst record.
I love Lana Del Rey! It's weird because I read something that said, "Oh, Willis Earl Beal and Lana Del Rey are the antithesis of each other." When in fact, she was what I wanted to sound like.
The person on the shrine is myself. I listen to my own music constantly. I made a whole other record already. I look at myself on the internet constantly, so much so that I actually physically hate my face. It's like I've become apart from myself. I can't even live up to myself.
I never actually sexually attacked anybody. But I'm a writer, too, and I was always trying to figure out a way to recreate the experience of being this Albert Camus, Stranger-like solitary protagonist character without incriminating myself in any way, like, "Oh, what a perv!" I want to reach out to anybody out there who may have been riding on the train one time when things in their life were completely falling apart and saw a girl's legs in a skirt and it's the last bit of goodness that you can see.
The truth is, all products - mine included - will take you away from yourself. You can listen to this music and think its pretty cool - or not - but the only thing that's going to save your soul is going somewhere alone and staying in that place for a while. Do something for yourself.
I first saw Dead Man in high school, and it changed everything. That movie was like a memory to me - I would get things that occurred in that movie confused with my actual life.
Nobody symbol occurred to me one night at my grandmother's house. The eyes are an inversion of X'd out eyes - the man is enlightened. His teeth are clenched. It's not a smiley face. It's right before he dies. It plays into my philosophy where everybody gets enlightened before they die.
The only way for me to give a good performance is to make myself extremely uncomfortable - and it just so happens that being on stage makes me extremely uncomfortable.
I want to help people to not feel alone, like I feel and have felt for so long. Everybody's just trying their best. I guess I'm like an anti-star.
I don't know what people want. I have delusions of grandeur, but I'm not sitting here talking to you and thinking that I'm the goddamn President. I want to know everything, but I just can't.
That's not to say I came from the streets or anything - most of the time I was on my grandmother's back porch. I was kept in a constant state of amniotic fluid.
I don't mind being artificial sometimes, because I like veiling myself. I mean, I'm not honest or sincere: I am self-centered and narcissistic. I just want to be this entity.
I think that live music is really pretentious - all of it. I hate festivals and live shows, because as soon as I get on stage, I start performing for people and it becomes about sex, banter, and skill. They're looking at me and not thinking about themselves. I'm thinking about how cool I look. It's just stupid - all live music is really stupid. I wouldn't encourage going to see anybody live, ever. Not even me.
I don't have a computer, but when I get access to one, I'm always looking myself up on Google, because it's exciting.
People tend to believe that I want to make soul music, which is not entirely untrue but, really, I want to be like the black Tom Waits - I don't want to make one kind of sound.
