I fell in love with funk music through my father - Funkadelic - as well as soul and classical early on.
'Downward Spiral' felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.
I really try to wake up with my music the same as I do with my life, and that is with no expectations. I just feel what I feel that day and follow it.
To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.
I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much.
Everyone in the music industry is so fun and laid-back.
Music for me is not just being on a stage and singing. It's my coping mechanism.
Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.
The music and everything we're doing on the stage and on television backs itself up. If that's what gets people's curiosity going or brings their attention to us, that's fine.
Girls always make our music go. They set the trends. It starts with the ladies.
Music is my thing. It's my thing; it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me; it's Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.
I just play the music that I love with musicians that I respect, and fortunately, I'm in a position where people are willing to play with me, and perhaps I can do something to help them.
'Punk rock' is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.
It's just always been a hobby of ours to make music that makes us happy and excites us when we make it.
Presley is country music, white music. Jazz is black music - it was invented by the blacks in New Orleans. And I'm really a jazz singer. I was impressed with Elvis - he was the handsomest guy I ever met in my life, and a very nice person, too. But the music doesn't impress me.
If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That's the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don't enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it. Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.
I treat every album as a new beginning, so I'm asking myself, 'What is pop music now? What are people consuming?' and I take these things into effect.
I'm one of those artists that doesn't actually hate my old hits. I love Boston music. I really like 'More than a Feeling.' After playing it to myself in a basement for such a long time, I'm happy to do it out on stage.
I'm probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons. They made me stop studying the accordion.
I always had a hard time communicating my emotions. I'd retreat into my bedroom and listen to music. And when you're a teenager, you're dealing with all these hormones. It's like, 'What are these?'
People haven't always been there for me, but music always has.
I just want to make the best music I can make.
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.
None of my kids want to be actors. They are actually very interested in being musicians. I think they like the process of film from the outside. Mad is interested in editing. Pax loves music and deejaying.
I'm thrilled we've got a new single out, as singles were the way I first got into music as a child.
Music is an art that goes well beyond science. Proof can be found in the huge amount of studies that have been carried out throughout the world based on music-therapy and the important results achieved.
I love movies. And sometimes it will be a case where I don't notice music.
Music is therapy. Music moves people. It connects people in ways that no other medium can. It pulls heart strings. It acts as medicine.
I find there is room in music to talk with music. It may expand ways people can participate with music. It doesn't sound hokey or like some kind of voice-over.
The way I see it, if people truly love my music, they will support me in some way down the road.
Dance music always goes through its changes; many styles come have their light and go back to the underground 'til it happens again.
I feel like a lot of serious music lives in generalizations - 'Love is a flower,' 'The sky is so dark' - but comedy lives in specifics.
With contemporary music, you automatically get connected. It connects you to the emotion of the characters.
I listen to music to when I'm feeling a certain way or to make myself feel a certain way. So why not make my own music inspired by true emotions?
Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.
I just think, certainly for live music it should look as good as it sounds.
