Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews. And if you’ve ever talked to that dude, he’s the sweetest guy in the world – he’s just a trip.
When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.
There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.
I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.
I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It’s one of the reasons I dropped out of school. Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.
What I really miss these days in music – is the music. I prefer to listen to melodies and songs, not just sounds.
My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.
When there’s so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you’ve already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?
I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.
Dude, maybe not everyone loves ‘Glee.’ Me included. I watched 10 minutes and it wasn’t my thing.
When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors – old friends, family.
I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.
The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.
When you’re recording to tape, you usually just settle for what you have. There’s not a lot of options to manipulate the performance.
I think musicians like me are drawn to those older desks, not just because they’re legend and lore but also because they do something really specific that is hard to emulate or re-create digitally.
Different boards do different things to the sound that’s coming through them. An old Neve desk does embellish it in a way that makes it sound sort of bigger or warmer. It doesn’t change the performance but it does enhance the way that it sounds.
It’s funny, there aren’t too many musicians that also moonlight as studio engineers. There’s a few – the really brilliant ones.
You can make yourself the greatest singer in the world or the best drummer in the world with the aid of technology.
A place like Sound City, which was just a big, beautiful room where you would hit record and capture the sound of the performer – a place like that isn’t necessarily in demand anymore.
I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it’s changed generations of people.