Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for ...
Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understa...
I like rock music because it's always sonically fascinating. There's never a method to what it needs to sound like. It's just however that instrument comes out that day, whatever the humidity level was in the air, what studio you were at. All that ma...
What Guitar Hero has done is to turn music inside out. Whereas the iPod made music very personal, very singular - you put your ear-buds in and you listen to it - Guitar Hero turned it around and made it very social. So it is fun to play. It's fun to ...
My thing is related to who I am as a person. The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I'm feeling at the time, whatever direction I'm heading in...
When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn't really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, s...
I wanted to do it my way with my career, and I had this arrogant notion that people weren't just interested in my music but me as a person. That was my bit of arrogance, I guess. That's something I learned from Madonna. I was a fan right from the fir...
Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying t...
You bring to chess facets of your personality and what you are. I have interests other than chess, like music and world and current affairs. I also have many friends around the world with whom I like to keep in touch.
These are very difficult times for new artists. Back in the day, a hit song could really seep into a person's DNA with radio and MTV. A hit today is not the same as a hit twenty years ago. Now there is so much competition, it is very hard to reach th...
Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, ...
Although my music is electronic, it has a lot of influences from my past, which is all sorts of genres; I've been in a rock-metal band for a long time, and I still feel like, personally, I have a lot of influence from that. My classical influence, yo...
I think I'm a fun flatmate. I'm always cheerful. I go on tour with my band so it's 12 people on one bus and I feel like I'm the one who's happy in the morning. I'm not a chaotic person, but I might slack off on doing the dishes from time to time.
What a person feels within themselves and about themselves radiates from them. Trust me, I have worked with people - both men and women - who are not what most would consider conventionally attractive, but who exude such a magnetism about them that p...
Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or ...
My mom's brother was gay, and he actually passed away from AIDS when I was 13. He was quite a character, but he also worked at the electrical plant, so he was this complicated guy with a big laugh who would wear a trucker hat and do impressions. He w...
I personally like to hang out with people; if I'm playing their mom, I'd like to go have lunch with the kid, and I want to try to spend as much time with people that I can while we are working together if we're supposed to have a familiar relationshi...
Scrawling 'I'm gay' in lipstick on your parents' bedroom mirror may demonstrate a personal signature of the highest style, but is not particularly sensitive to their feelings. Upon hearing me utter those words almost twenty years ago, my own mother d...
I did not have a personal relationship with Jesus until I met my nanny, who helped me through a failing marriage and raising my two boys in a New York City apartment. She showed me by example what it was like to be able to talk to Jesus and bring all...
I think you really have to remember what you loved about making music in the first place. Ultimately, people can be like, 'We've seen this dude in many movies,' but if they hear a song and they're feeling it, they can look past all the personal thing...
There certainly is no secret in that there are plenty of people who don't like plenty of my movies. Each one of my films is personal; each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that. With each one of my films, I...
