Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
If I had girls to educate I would not have them learn both music and drawing.
I've been thinking about going back to university. I need more tools to continue to apply to the music. I've got to open myself up to more language.
I was a total music nerd. I grew up on Perry Street in the '80s. My father wrote books about jazz, so I was always at the 'Village Vanguard.'
There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music, they have no clue what it's all about. It's a lifestyle. It's not about popularity and all that crap.
A lot of my music that I like puts energy in your body or makes you want to dance or break something or just go mosh or jump around.
I was just a music lover who wondered what it would sound like if Otis Redding strapped on a guitar and played in a punk band. That's it.
My songwriting is so influenced by orchestrated music, dramatic, super glam rock-y stuff. Two of my biggest influences in songwriting were Elton John and Freddie Mercury.
If anyone asks you what kind of music you play, tell him 'pop.' Don't tell him 'rock'n'roll' or they won't even let you in the hotel.
Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.
I've always loved New Orleans music. I always loved it when the Neville Brothers opened up for the Grateful Dead and the Dirty Dozen and all that.
A Deap Vally renaissance is going to begin next year and will be our focus for the start of 2013. They will blow the cobwebs off a music scene that has become just a little bit stale.
The big turning point, really, was the Beatles' influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came the Lovin' Spoonful and everybody else.
I walk my dogs. I garden a little. I play a bit of tennis. Basically when I have spare time I'm making music.
I listen to all kinds of songs. There's something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it's pop or jazz or hip-hop.
We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.
I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.
Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why.
I don't want to be that girl who has that same style all the time where the music always sounds exactly the same, and you always know it's her.
My dream artist to play at prom would be Frank Ocean. 'Thinking Of You' is one of my favorite songs. He makes really sweet music for slow dancing at prom.
What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.
