I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
It’s hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.
Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you’re using words to express an angry feeling, you’re already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.
I think it’s a misconception that metal’s about anger, obviously.
I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me.
In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It’s a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
I really love Durham more than any place I’ve ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.
I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.
I still get really excited looking at stuff that I’ve seen every day for 20 years.
Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that’s what walking through New York on a June evening feels like – you feel like it’s Friday and you’re 17 years old.
When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.
People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.
I always worry that I’m a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don’t have exhaustive knowledge of much.
I couldn’t name more than a couple of good drum’n’bass acts, and I have no idea what’s big in the dance world right now.
The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.
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.
I crave music that’ll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.
Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I’m nobody’s authority.
People will complain that they don’t want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low.