A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.
I met Elton John at an Interview dinner, and we just sort of became friends. He's got such a wicked sense of humor.
If I was a sex symbol, I would be getting laid a lot more than I am now.
Music is just air moving around.
Being a vegan is pretty easy these days, as almost every town and city has health food stores and vegetarian-friendly restaurants.
My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'
But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.
As music became more profitable in the 1990s, it seemed like it attracted a lot of people who were just interested in the financial aspect of it, which is depressing.
I need an audience way more than an audience needs me.
For better or worse, I'm interested in just about everything: every different type of music I can imagine. I can never see a reason to choose just one type of music at the exclusion of everything else. Different types of music are capable of being rewarding in different kinds of ways.
It's heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.
I did a cover of the James Bond theme, and I felt like such a fraud, because the original is so good.
I'm a terrible cook, so I usually eat out with friends.
I think that Eminem is very talented and remarkably bright, and I actually do like a lot of his music.
Traffic terrifies me.
I don't sleep very well when I travel. And as a result, I tend to be awake in cities when everyone else is asleep.
But at the same time, I don't let myself regret things to the point that I'm paralyzed.
I was on food stamps until I was 18 and became an adult.
I'm envious of people who can sleep as long as they want. I have the circadian rhythm of a farmer.
If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote.
Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.
I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.
It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.
There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.
What sounds good on the radio is really loud kick drums and loud snare drums, when everything's bombastic and in your face. It's the equivalent of a houseguest who screams all the time.
At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.
When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn't a big, 'John Carter of Mars' type failure. It wasn't dramatic; it was just depressing.
The truth is that genetics has robbed me of hair. But it's not interesting to blame genetics.
I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.
I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.
I'm perfectly happy for my videos to be on YouTube, whether I'm getting paid for them or not. If they're on YouTube, people will see them. If for some reason my videos get taken down from YouTube, well, I apologize. If it was up to me they'd all be up there and they'd all be free.
If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.
It's a very strange phenomenon being hated by people you've never met. Some journalists just seem to hate me and everything I do, and it's disconcerting because I've never met this person.
Scotland is one of my favourite places to perform: it's really something special. Scottish audiences are just so enthusiastic; their approach to dance music just feels similar to my own somehow.
Every time you read an interview with a supermodel, they're always like, 'Oh, I was a such nerd.' I resent that a little bit. I was in the A/V club. I used to eat my lunch in a closet.
It's enshrined in our Constitution that an individual has a right to release information and disseminate information that makes the powers that be uncomfortable.