The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.
You have a career, and you start as a business person. And you work your way, you reach this peak, and you know the time's going to come when you go back down.
In business, you can have one massive success that earns $50 million overnight, and that's it. You're successful. End of story. But in the music business, you have to keep on doing it.
You learn at a certain point that you have to focus on the business side of music. After getting ripped off a couple of times, you figure out that you need to get a grip on it.
I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.
I used to go with him and I'd sometimes play, take over from him. That was my first taste of the music business, I suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at Johnston Grammar.
When I started working on my own music, I didn't have the chance to record in a big music studio, so I had to record everything myself.
As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.
A chance to work with the guys from Isis sounded like a lot of fun. I've always been into the atmospheric sounds they had created with that project and felt my sense of melody would meld well with theirs.
I think that every new record is a chance to... I think what it is for me is my heart and soul at that moment in time... I've always felt that just being able to make a record is a privilege.
Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'
The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.
The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.
I love Bob Dylan. Who doesn't? He tapped into some kind of vein and it keeps on keeping on. There's nobody like him. He's unique, and just... way out cool.
You've got to be strong enough for love. It's very easy to be cool and cynical. It's very difficult to just let yourself go and be in love. You've got to be strong enough for that.
I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, 'Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.'
It's cool to have critical success because it's always nice for your peers to say, 'Good job.' But who cares about them?
I studied to be a lawyer, and after that I did something, obviously, completely different. With change, you learn something. If you do the same thing over and over again, you never learn anything.
I change the language with which I use my voice. In opera, I know I have an orchestra behind me; I have to communicate to people very far from me.
There are those who simply want to live their lives, and feel they cannot live the way they want to in Iran. Others are ideologically motivated: They will stay no matter what and try to change things.
I always wanted to get into rock music so I could cover up my real personality, change my voice, and create a false self to hide behind.
