When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
In a sense, the god we trust politically is a slightly different god than the one we bring into the fray when we enter a rock concert. One of the things I can say with absolute conviction is that I worship that god.
There are a lot of country artists now that are heavily influenced by hip-hop. That's not me. I was very heavily influenced by rock & roll.
My life won't be a series of either/ors - musician or actor, rock or country, straitlaced or rebellious, this or that, yes or no. The real choices in life aren't that simple.
When we filmed the premiere episode of 'United Shades of America,' it was like we were turning over a rock in the woods. The KKK was not part of the national conversation. They were really just a punchline for comedians when you needed to let the audience know something was really, really, really racist.
In my day, when I was a young kid, army duty was compulsory in South Africa or you go to jail. I had the choice, so I spent a year in the entertainment unit, and outside of doing shows - and I used to write for, arrange for the big band - outside of doing that, I actually had a rock band in the army.
I get noticed for different things I've done in different areas of town. If I'm in a rock club, it'll be Skid Row, if I'm in a mall it's the 'Gilmore Girls.'
When I'm playing 'Rock Band,' I'm like, 'Man, someday, later on in life when I'm a famous rock star...' Which gets a little harder to convince myself of as I reach middle age, but it still happens a lot.
I always figure hey, look, I'm not a rock star, I'm an actor. I'm somebody who's meant to be other people and I'm not meant to be here representing myself. I'm happier when I'm presenting myself as other characters.
I like What Goes Around Comes Around for old concert tees. Oh man, I got this 'Sgt. Pepper' cartoon Beatles shirt there; it was, like, $300. I didn't even know how much it cost - I thought it was gonna be, like, $80 at most - till I got to the register and was like, 'Oh mah gawd!' Good Lord. But it's classic vintage rock, you know?
We have a saying in my house, my kids and my girlfriend. We say, 'Be your best for the greater good, and rock out wherever you are.'
I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
I had known that I'd wanted to be an actor from a very early age, but I had always known that I wanted to have a dual career. I wanted to be an actor, and I also at that time wanted to be a rock star.
Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.
The feathers have been retired to the London Hard Rock Cafe. I don't obsess about it as much. Also, it's strange - the better physical shape I get in, the less I care about what suit I'm covering myself up in. I'm not really out to flaunt it, but I'm just more comfortable in my own skin.
The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.
I was in lots of dodgy bands growing up and I always fancied myself in a band. But, you know, I was rubbish at writing music. So maybe one day I'll play a rock star, or punk rocker.
It's always great when you just pound the rock, impose your will, and that is going to break the spirit of the defense if you can keep running it and they can't stop you.
Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.
If your album sells, that's cool, more people find out about you, more people get turned on to what we're really about-which is a live rock and roll band.
I wouldn't say there is one specific designer I rock. It's more of the look of the shirt and what occasion and where I'm wearing it to.
Obviously, any living musician born after 1960 has been touched by rock and roll. It's the music of our time, and it's 'in the air,' as Steve Reich would say. My experience of it is just really direct because I'm actually playing in a collaborative band.
When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.
I think that, by and large, the predominant voice we hear in rock music is a white male voice.
Music was segregated in the '80s, and then in the '90s the boundaries started to break down, and rock kids got into electronic music. But then you got this reverse snobbery where people would only listen to electronic music and not rock.
I'm a big rock star, I got a beautiful girl, and they still call me a fag. Its' like high school never ends - the jocks are always on top.
Anthony Mackie in 'The Hurt Locker' is everything an actor can hope to be. So rock steady in his portrayal that you immediately forget every performance he may have previously given, and focus only on the character in front of you.
The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.
Every 15, 20, 25 years, a new rock and roll record needs to come out and a new rock and roll band needs to come out.
If I go without rock for too long, I feel depressed.
From 1994 to 1996, I turned over every rock in Little Rock, looking for a silver bullet that would take down the Clintons in time for the 1996 election.
I'll hear us on classic rock radio stations, and I'll go, 'Oh, my God, we're getting old!'
I've been obsessed with seeing life through music. My records, my relationship with records, my relationship with rock stars, everything that surrounds it, has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.
I try to be a better dad and husband than I do pretend rock star.
The early parodies that talk-show people did of rock n' roll in the '50s were terrible. They didn't know it, they didn't like it - and that's a lethal combination.
I personally wouldn't want my second album to sound like my first; it might sound very rocky or hard rock - and that wouldn't be melancholy. So if people think my music is melancholic, then so be it. It's meant to be uplifting, and I'm just basically saying what needs to be said.
