The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing.
I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.
If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about?
I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.
I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.
I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most.
When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.
When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.
Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.
Something just happens when you're making a record, where certain things start to come out. It's just something in the air.
I had long hair when I was a teenager.
When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.
I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys.
I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial.
Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.
Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.
To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.
As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.
I'm a musician. I'm not, like, a personality. I've never really pretended to perform that kind of function.