I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.
I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.
One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.
For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It's just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.
I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me.
'Heel Turn 2' is about a person who's in a match, and he's playing as though the match were real. But it is real! If you're standing in the middle of a ring, and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.
My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on 'Law & Order: SVU' during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something, so they can force us to stop playing while they question the sound guy.
A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?
For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.
Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release - but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat; it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral.
I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.
Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.
To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value, and it takes your time, and it's useful to people, depending.
Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.'
A band's first album's usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.
When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.
I wrote 'Lakeside View Apartment Suites' with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him crying in the next room.
Something I've learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don't really bind musicians.
I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.
