There's a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It's really gone too far. I don't know an easy way to turn it back.
Americans are always mortified when I tell them this, but in England, it's a tradition to put your plaques and photographs and awards and gold records and stuff in your bathroom. I don't know why.
Heath Ledger was supposed to put our album on what would have been a new record label. I still feel a little dead after losing him.
When I record, it feels like I'm in a bubble. There's nothing else in my head right then. It's just that song, and I'm trying to really sound like what the song is about.
If you use a cell phone - as I do - your wireless carrier likely has records about your physical movements going back months, if not years.
I have been the subject of ridicule. People talk about me and they don't know me and this is an opportunity to tell my story... to have my voice and to set the record straight.
It's so hard to pick a 'single.' I always want it to be whatever my favorite tune is, but often the record company and the person whose job it is to take it to radio have different ideas.
More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don't happen in the studio.
We've managed to have a long career that is still quite vibrant, yet we've never had to kow-tow to record companies who said we weren't commercial enough.
When people come to a concert, they wanna hear the hits, the big radio songs, and they wanna hear them how they're used to hearing them. I like playing them how they were recorded.
I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.
We try and stay out of the corporate side of it. The band has never compromised. At some point in our career we could have made a certain type of record and sold millions of units, as they are called.
When I released my first record, I was really in the middle of having made the decision to follow the clinical psychology path, which is competitive, rigorous, and fairly conservative.
I used to link up boom boxes, record one take, play it into another boom box then play all that back into the other one until I had six tracks. It was unlistenable!
If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.
My son was five months old, and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house.
Don't give up, be positive and if you know someone who knows someone at a record company don't stop beating down their door till you get heard. Don't ever say it'll never happen or it'll never happen.
When you hear a large symphony orchestra. for instance, in a concert hall, there's a big, sweeping sound that just doesn't get on to a record.
We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.
When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.
What changed our lives forever was when Malcolm had the idea to sell rock 'n roll records to trendy customers.
