Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.
I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, 'Look, I made a career out of carefully and craftfully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers.'
Sometimes a song that didn't make one record will stay in my head for so long and just won't go away. I take that as a hint to keep 'em close and not forget about them.
Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento.
I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a resurgence of civic-mindedness in this country. Hopefully the younger generations, which came out in record numbers during the last presidential election, will pass their enthusiasm on to their children.
We know that the far left and their media allies can't beat us on the issues, so instead they'll distort our records. Let's not do the job for them, OK, Republicans? OK, independents?
After moving to England I did some recording and eventually formed an English band, this was together for quite a few years with only a keyboard replacement. The band had no name, just my name.
I started buying records in the '80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk.
I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.
I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.
I have an independent record label called Favored Nations on which I released an album by an artist called Johnny A, who plays an arch top Gibson through a Marshall, but the tone is all in his fingers.
The sound has grown and sweetened over the years as well, and you can hear it on many of my recordings and, most likely, will see and hear me playing it if you come to a live show.
It's been over 15 years since I toured... over 12 years since I did any recording under my own name. I never really intended to take that long of a hiatus.
We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.
The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me - like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor - all had their own voice and individual style.
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
There's plenty for me to do. There are more albums. I'll record as long as I can and as long as my voice works as well as it does now and for as long as people want to hear me.
The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.
My whole thing is feel free to hate me - I so don't care if you hate me, but meet me, and listen to my record, and know me before you hate me.
Anyone who's an executive at a record label does not understand what the Internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact - no idea. I'm surprised they know how to use e-mail.
Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.
