Light is a metaphoric thing. There is green light and red light. Then there is black light, which is mostly danger.
I'm so hard on myself. I play these sketches in my computer for friends and they say 'Gee whiz, the vocal's beautiful.' I hear, 'It needs to be better.'
I discovered that close to half the planet is 'pristine.' We live in towns such as London, Paris or Sao Paulo and have the impression that all the pristine areas are gone, but they are not.
I get it. I really do. It's got to suck for people to see your sexual orientation instead of seeing you.
I think the way I play the guitar is very percussive. I play a lot of rhythm chops as though I were playing congas or something.
I'm buying records a lot, like, every week I'm just buying old reissues or old originals or new records that I have heard about.
You can say we're trying too hard or that we didn't try hard enough, but we're not trying at all; we're just doing what we do.
I've figured out what to do with my hands... onstage. I'm a percussion player, so I grab a tambourine as much as I can.
We have our own language. Christianese... We don't say 'He's out of his mind,' no, we say 'That's our youth pastor.
The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist.
A still image attracts the viewer with an overall impact, then reveals smaller details upon further study.
The disintegration of the culture starts with the artist. I'm on a crusade to turn the tide in the arts, to restore dignity to the arts and, by extension, to the culture.
I've never been at odds with the world of contemporary artists. If there is any animosity, it's one-sided.
I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say, 'Which of these things do I want to record?'
Rather than a big figure, I guess you could say I'm more of an influential minority symbol.
In Japan, I focus mostly on sending messages through Twitter, trying to spread my minority way of thinking.
I think you have to ask questions that are scary to ask, and you cannot apologize for that, and you cannot worry what anyone else thinks about your journey.
I think that there are a lot of things that come along with being a musician, but I don't want to whine about them. I don't want to complain about my job.
My point of view as a writer has to be a lot more ego-less than just like being some performer on stage with a hairdo.
I'm a writer, first and foremost, and I sort of take my cues from the songwriters of the '70s, who are talking about what's really important to them.
Acting lessons teach you to really listen to what the other person is saying because in acting it's all about responding to the lines.
