I have a pleasant voice, but I have no great range. I will say that I know how to make a song come alive and I guess I do have a sincerity that comes across. But I do alot of things better than sing.
In the open air you don't play as many quiet songs as you would normally.
As the fans' voting reflected, people want to hear your best-known songs.
Sometimes to move forward you have to let go. I figured that out through opening myself up, allowing people into my creative process. It allowed me to write songs that surprised me, and in fact, inspired me.
I started dealing with my emotional pain by writing. I always had been a writer, but just not songs. Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.
I do all the things that singer-songwriters do. I introduce the songs, I have a story to tell about everything all the time - I cannot be on stage and have something on my mind without telling the audience. I'm super emotional and expressive and vulnerable in that moment.
When it comes down to the song writing, I'm just very slow - very slow. Because the songs are about my life, so I'm doing emotional work on myself. As I'm writing these songs, I have to learn these lessons and dig real deep into my heart to write this stuff.
When I finish a song, I never feel like I want to restrict its life. I feel that once I've done something, it's out. It's in people's ears, cars, headphones. It has its own journey.
In the morning I'd write these essays, anything that I'd feel like writing, and in the afternoon, I'd spend time with my guitar. I had decided after listening to my last four or five albums that my biggest weakness musically was melody. the reason I had been singing in a monotone over the chord patterns in my songs was that I never practiced doing melodies.
Well, after Zombie Birdhouse came out, I toured behind it in the fall of 1982, into the spring, and in the summer in the Far East. At that time, I found my work self-referential; it was getting to be rock songs about a rock singer who lived a rock life on the rock road, and I was starting to wonder what I would be like to rent my own apartment, what it would be like to have a checkbook.
Every leading lady I work with, I'll see if I can get a song out of them and put it on an album.
I've always been making stuff. I had a very free upbringing, and very encouraging parents. I just found that it was a really cool thing, to write songs. And then, I think it was probably about when I was about 19 years old, people started telling me I should try to do this, get the music out.
If I do a song where I'm angry, when it's time to perform it live I'm not mad, I'm happy. I'm at a concert. But I have to somehow drum up that rage. That's acting.
I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all. I don't take anything back, so I do look after them to some degree. But my main focus is on what I'm doing now.
I consider the piano my 'main' instrument and have been playing for as long as I can remember. It seems to me that I might have come up with something resembling a song as early as 4 or 5 years old.
For most people who have or who do identify as or with [song] Straight Edge, I feel like for most people, they're just trying to do the right thing.
As far as the bands that are reforming now, it's always nice to see old friends and hear some of those great songs, but it's just not our thing.
Guy Picciotto had a really sound point: Live albums basically have bands playing songs that are available on studio records, and what example can you think of where the live album is better? What are the great live albums? I have live albums of bands, but I wouldn't listen to them for the most part. So we thought, instead of spending energy trying to puzzle out how to create a live record, let's just write another studio record.
My focus is always on the day. What I've done behind me, I try to have respect for it, and keep an eye on it, and make sure it isn't abused, and obviously be thoughtful about it, because it's all real to me. I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all.
I work so I don't need to make rent through my songs, and I think if more people engaged with music without needing it to provide for their welfare, you're not beholden to anyone.
When you're in a band and write a song on your own, it isn't fully realized until it goes into somebody else's ears.
"Straight Edge" was a song about my life. There was no structure, no premise as if I was forming a club. There were no tenets. I mean I wrote a song called "Straight Edge," I'll take that, but the song was about my life the way I wanted to live it.
Words are charms. It's like a song you didn't even know you knew.
I'm still trying to find the perfect Nirvana song that's an example of that, but you do hear a lot of their songs start with an extremely emotional death grunts.
In most cases, my favorite Jethro Tull songs will be determined by how I feel about them as live performance songs, not by the recorded identity.
