I read Henry Miller's 'Nexus,' 'Sexus' and 'Plexus' the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.
When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.
I'm interested in direct communication about domestic life.
In the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.
It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.
In an email... like I did 100 interviews, and I never repeated one story. That's impossible to do when you do face-to-face interviews, because your brain locks and you say the same thing over and over again.
Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.
Natalie Maines has a voice for the centuries.
The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.
It must be very strange to live in the world of Willie Nelson or Bruce Springsteen or Pearl Jam. I don't know what kind of handle they have on their own loss of talent.
It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation's music, why can't we have our own?
Pragmatism and romance are sort of opposites.
The world of commerce is a kind of a purgatory itself.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.
I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.
The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.
