The ideology of the Smashing Pumpkins was ultimately more valuable than the music of the Smashing Pumpkins. That's what critics can't put their finger on.
My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing.
People think our music's very aggressive or angry or whatever, and it's just the opposite, really... I like laughing. And I like being really calm before a show, and smiley.
I know the music industry is based on a lot of smoke and mirrors in a lot of cases, such as making things look like one thing versus what it actually is. I feel like I've been here long enough that I've surpassed the need for any of that.
The music industry is a world of smoke and mirrors: they tell you exactly what they think you want to hear. And they are bare-faced lying. I tend to stay away from that.
Our show doesn't rely on the typical whistles and bells, and smoke and mirrors. It relies mostly on the music.
There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.
Everybody who I ever cared about has told me that they like my music: Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Al Green, The Spinners, Smokey Robinson. Everybody that matters.
We grew up listening to music like that: we grew up on the snap music, grew up off the trap music, grew up on all the South sound.
The snappy way I would sum it up is not everyone is queer, but everyone has felt different. And I think that is something that people can really relate to in our music.
'Salt' is like this snapshot in midair, an action shot. It's about my relationship with the church, the classical and choral music that I dealt with in school, and my new introduction to jazz. It's very hard for me to listen to from beginning to end, because I hear how lost I was.
For trance music to be good, it has to sneak up on you.
You grow up listening to Eminem; your parents don't let you listen to it - you gotta sneak into a car to listen to this guy rap. He changed my whole life, my whole perspective on music, so to more or less co-sign something that I've done is the ultimate childhood goal.
When I found out that my mom was sneaking listening to my music, I decided to make sure that my music is very clean.
People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.
In TV, film, and music there's a lot of snobbery, and I don't like it. I've never been a cultural snob.
I am not a music snob. If anything, my musical taste is bad by any critical standards.
There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.
