The ability and desire to transform the mundane materials at hand that we both bring into the collaboration well beyond the sum total of the parts - to birth a new baby neither of us could claim single parentage of.
Just wearing all black comes from Johnny Cash. I'm on the road so much that if I wear all black, my clothes never get dirty. You can't tell if I've worn the same shirt twice.
When we were 15, my brother and I were getting really into Nirvana, Green Day, and The Beastie Boys. We started going to shows and realized we really wanted to be on stage.
Everyone can get a little sloppy with cash and it's smart to notice. But what's squeezing you is the big stuff you ladle onto your credit cards.
If I didn't like someone, I wouldn't want him calling me up when I was dying. I wouldn't want them having regrets that they didn't talk to me.
What the study I chaired actually said was we needed tougher regulation of cash and capital in banks, as credit was too easy. Events proved that right.
I just sat down and thought, I'm going to write a song today, I'm going to give it a try. So I just stuck it on a tape like everything else. That was just another song.
I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.
We've always had our hardcore fans. But the general public has a love-hate thing about the 'Kinks.' It always leaves people with a question mark on their heads.
As an individual, I think you have to find your own path. I like the simplicity and purity of Hinduism and many elements of Buddhism. These are all means of accessing spiritual energy.
I can't stand tribute bands. It's nice, bless 'em, but it's not right. They can't capture the right spirit. You never see a tribute comedian, a tribute Les Dawson.
I see no kind of reason to not just try everything. I mean, I feel like we all have such varied tastes, and to not just try our tastes is a crime.
I don't want to say I hate remixes, because I don't, but I hate what instantly comes to mind now when people say 'remixes.'
There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.
No, I've heard over the years that it's nice for them to see somebody who's like, you know, a well-known successful musician who's Asian. I've heard it from a few musicians, too.
Musicians always come off sounding a little bit pretentious, and a little bit... I don't know, hypocritical, from what they do, talking about strong issues.
If you put all the songs together that I've written on band records, and put it up next to my solo record, there's definitely a different kind of feel than Billy's songs.
I think for a lot of people that had seen me do 'Snabba Cash', after watching 'The Killing,' I think they got a sense that I could do different kinds of characters.
And they just saw me on that and - from the time I was 11 until I was 12, I guess. And then when I had just turned 13, they asked me if I wanted to tour with Johnny Cash back East.
Working with the Kinks, there always seemed to be some kind of automatic process at work. Ray and I had this telepathy happening for a long time, where one of us always knew what the other could do with something.
Playing live is everything. Sometimes being on the road is hard, and it's a lot of work, and tiring. From a musical point of view, you improve all the time. Not only that, but you learn how to deal with people and deal with energy in a live setting.
