I have strong sentiments toward Iran, since I distinguish between the Iranian regime and the Iranian people. I highly esteem Iranian music and culture.
My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
The music I have created, along with the other Beach Boys, has taken me all over the world. For these past 50 years, I guess you could say, 'I get around.'
I'm really fed up with all the credibility talk. A lot of times it seems to be more important than the music. Well, I guess for a lot of people it actually is. We don't care for credibility.
Some people only work to recorded music because it's so reliable and exactly the same every time, which is exactly why I don't.
I can read music, but I have no technique, and singing was never an option even though I sang a lot growing up.
When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.
Music is my only guide. I don't care if people pigeonhole me. Miles Davis is my hero. He covered Cindy Lauper and Michael Jackson, and he didn't give a hoot about what the purists said.
I always tell people that the music industry may be frustrating sometimes, but the singing never gets old. It's something I grew up doing, and I take the bitter with the sweet.
I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.
My first break wasn't professional - I was in 'The Sound of Music' when I was five. I played Gretel, the youngest one, because that was what kind of took off for me in terms of loving acting.
Music is entirely subjective. I was thinking that for myself, for songwriting and what I like to listen to, to help motivate me as a songwriter, as a musician, there are certain things I lean towards and certain things I don't.
He helped make Living Things even more crazy than I wanted it to be. He added old-fashioned piano and classical folk music - that weird otherworldly vibe - all these elements got onto the record.
Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.
I approach music and acting the same way, through spontaneous improvisation. I never really try to rehearse anything, do it over and over, except when we're inside a take.
When I was 17, I listened to reggae music. I loved Bob Marley. I started growing dreadlocks. It's always been my way, that the outside matches what's going on with me inside.
It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped.
The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
I'm sure if we had made an album that was more traditional would have been released immediately. When we actually play this music on stage and people become familiar with it, it will become more popular.
The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass.
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.
