But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.
The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.
One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music.
We do all, myself included, we tend to hold ourselves to pretty low standards. But when it comes to judging public figures or politicians or people we've never met, we tend to hold people to very high standards, and, if we held ourselves to those standards, we'd always fall short.
I'm like a bad musical cliche because I bring my guitar on the road and try to write songs in hotel rooms.
The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places.
Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.
I don't think I'm a particularly good writer, and I'm not terribly insightful.
If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.
I love to be busy. I'm envious of people who are able to take their spare time and relax. All I like to do is work. Perhaps it's lingering Calvinist guilt?
Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.
I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.
I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook.
In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom.
At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.
When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I'm not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn't too rigorous or challenging.
A lot of my friends who grew up in Manhattan have a strange phobia about Brooklyn. It's big and scary and they get lost.
I always feel kind of absurd and presumptuous presenting a speech.
A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.
There are a lot of public figures who, before they take a stand on a issue, they talk about it with their publicist and they figure out how it's going to affect record sales. Life is really too short to worry about that sort of thing.
