'Seconds' is grounded in the reality of this restaurant environment, and I did do plenty of research, so there's that. It takes place in a town that is like a kinder, gentler fairy tale version of reality. Then it takes off into a story that is very ...
I don't think anyone ever sets out to make a crappy movie, but there are a lot of forces working against those people who are trying to make something decent. There are a lot of fine lines to walk and small battles to fight.
If I'm listening to country, it's Hank Williams, George Jones, Merle Haggard and stuff like that. If people out there don't take that stuff seriously, well, they just haven't listened to it and don't know what they're talking about.
I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn't think that they were indicative of '54 to '57, although I tried to stay within that period.
The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.
Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.
One of my favorites has always been 'Swap Meet.' One of the reasons why I like that is it's a song that's in a drop-D tuning, and of course, also being a guitar player, it's one of the songs that I really like the riff on it.
I named myself Flash many years ago, as I loved the cartoon. Then my own fans said that I should call myself 'Grandmaster,' because of the way I operate turntables. I put the two together and that was it.
The REM and Nirvana successes don't mean much to me except as a potential distraction for bands who want to cash in on the trend. Don't try to sound like someone else. REM and Nirvana don't sound like anyone else.
When I embraced the rock hat, when I put it on two or three years ago, when I realized I'm gonna go and make really focused rock albums, it felt like wearing an old shoe. It was a perfect fit.
It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.
In a normal movie, the director controls what you look at. The shots don't last very long because you're getting the audience to look at specific things. An IMAX shot, on the other hand, can be twenty or thirty seconds long.
I'm satisfied and proud of the things I did - even the bumps and the bruises that I've had on the way. You fall down, you get up, you brush yourself off and you keep going. And that's what we're doing.
I was a floor model at I. Magnin. I'm 5 feet 7, but my legs weren't long enough to be a big-time model. From the knees up, everything is long, but from ankle to knee, if I was in proportion, I'd be 5 feet 9.
I do get a bit of a sense, just from e-mails some people send me, just a little sense of how people in different countries seem to respond differently to certain lines in a song.
A lot of those songs are actually about Sarah, who I was recently divorced from about five or six months ago. I'd been seeing her off and on since I was about nineteen, so a lot of those songs are about her.
Most of our fans seem to be very intelligent people who don't stand out too much, but they're still total freaks. I like that - they're smart and sadistic, which I think is a reflection at us.
The main thing was finding this... voice that I had interest in, which I'll call the quiet-yet-stoic voice: the very quiet yet very strong voice that I developed, that people would want to hear and that was worth paying attention to.
It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world.
Traveling has a major impact on what I do, cause all over the world I'm meeting all kinds of people. And relationships is the second major impact that I have. I just enjoy the variety that the world has to offer.
Those people who shun us just because of the label we're on, or the fact that we've got a video out there that's getting us somewhere, are only limiting themselves, because they aren't keeping an open mind.