You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.
I realize I’m a mirror.
I often have deer on my property and there’s a fox and owls. You’re not going to see that in the city.
I feel completely free to do whatever I want and how I want to do it. I feel unburdened by my past.
I’m a Pisces, and Pisces have this weird inability to be completely spontaneous. We’re too conscious of our actions. I’ve always been way too sensible for my own good.
Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song ‘Cow.’
For a 6-foot-3 guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I’ve done all right.
It’s wonderful to read interviews by old blues guys – they talk about all their influences, they talk about who taught them how to play, and who they saw, and how they were determined to play that way.
You will never see the four original Pumpkins on stage ever again, unless it’s a Hall of Fame thing. But you would never see a tour. There’s so much damage, there’s no way.
I think the days of working with producers in the conventional sense are over for me.
Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock.
Music is 99% of my life. But I know I need a break. Besides, if you give people too much, they start to not want it. We need to restrain ourselves.
The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it’s a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too.
Heavy metal is a universal energy – it’s the sound of a volcano. It’s rock, it’s earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand.
I really think it’s a white, bourgeois idea to pretend that you don’t have influences. It seems to be the obsession strictly of white people in college.
When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that’s gone before.
I never seemed to fit in. But it made me try to strive for things ten times harder.
My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn’t like other children.
As a 28 year old who’s lived long enough to know the difference, I know now that the feelings I felt an 16 were not necessarily correct. But however overly dramatic, the desperation and hopelessness I felt at 16 was my reality.
My view of the world is always tempered by the fact that there are people who are less fortunate than I am.