I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.
More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.
When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound – Joy Division’s ‘Closer,’ or Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Heaven Up Here’… I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.
As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of making music is to get it heard by as many people as possible.
I’ve had insomnia since I was a little kid and I never sleep well. Sometimes I sleep very badly and sometimes I sleep slightly badly. I get it especially when I’m on tour because you cross a lot of time zones, and I’m not very adaptable.
When I say, ‘I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ,’ I mean that in the most simple and naive way. I’m not saying I’m right.
If you’re inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you’re doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you’re just not looking hard enough.
I did a cover of the James Bond theme, and I felt like such a fraud, because the original is so good.
For better or worse, I’m interested in just about everything: every different type of music I can imagine. I can never see a reason to choose just one type of music at the exclusion of everything else. Different types of music are capable of being rewarding in different kinds of ways.
New York is such a competitive place; it tears people apart. People come here and, if they can’t make it in the first month, they get torn apart and they have to go back to where they came from. I don’t think that’s terribly healthy.
‘Arbitrary’ and ‘odd’ are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I’m perpetually baffled by the whole thing.
There’s a fairly extensive network of musicians on tour who are all trying to stay sober, and we generally reach out to each other and offer support when and where we can.
What sounds good on the radio is really loud kick drums and loud snare drums, when everything’s bombastic and in your face. It’s the equivalent of a houseguest who screams all the time.
It’s much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you’re a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.
David Lynch is my friend, and I love his movies and his art and his music. Few things make me happier than working with him.
The term ‘renaissance man’ is always bandied about. I don’t think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.
If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he’d probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.
Who wakes up when they’re worth £120million and says, ‘I’m unhappy today but if only I had an extra £2million!’
You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.
I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.
I’m envious of people who can sleep as long as they want. I have the circadian rhythm of a farmer.
We do all, myself included, we tend to hold ourselves to pretty low standards. But when it comes to judging public figures or politicians or people we’ve never met, we tend to hold people to very high standards, and, if we held ourselves to those standards, we’d always fall short.
I wasn’t raised Catholic; I just really like the image of a neutral and benign Mary floating around somewhere, being nice to people.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song’s hook.
When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I’m not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn’t too rigorous or challenging.
Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It’s a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.
If you care about women’s rights, you can’t not vote.
The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be ‘eclectic.’
I remember New York in the ’80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It’s too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.
I love to be busy. I’m envious of people who are able to take their spare time and relax. All I like to do is work. Perhaps it’s lingering Calvinist guilt?
Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.
It’s heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.
I don’t have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.
I love it when celebrities fall apart.
I’m a terrible cook, so I usually eat out with friends.
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