For me my biggest inspiration is trying to make music that effects me as much as the music made by my heroes.
I love nyc. It’s the city of my birth and probably the most amazing city on the planet.
Because I’ve been that drunk person in the club so many thousands of times, when I’m in an environment where people are drunk or on drugs, I certainly don’t judge them. Because it’s almost a given that for much of my life I’ve been way more messed up than them.
I’ve been an animal rights activist and a vegan for 28 years. The entire time, I’ve asked myself: How do I best advance an animal rights agenda?
Success usually breeds a degree of hubris.
I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here’s hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.
I’m not sure how healthy it is to shoot police helicopters with bazookas.
I find the fact that so few people buy albums to be strangely emancipating. There’s absolutely no reason for 99% of musicians making albums to think about actually selling albums. So as a musician you can just make an album for the love of making albums.
My records are fairly quiet and my dj sets are really loud. And then the live shows are like a robot soul revue. So i understand people’s confusion.
What I love about making albums in the 21st century is that so few people buy albums! I can make an album without any commercial concerns whatsoever.
An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.
I have nothing against bombastic music, but when it comes to making albums, I’d prefer to make music that has a sort of vulnerable subtlety to it.
I’m offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.
If I had to label myself now, I’d call myself a Taoist-Christian-agnostic quantum mechanic.
I realized the universe is 15 billion years old and unspeakably complicated. I still love the teachings of Christ, but I also believe that the human condition prevents us from having any true objective knowledge and understanding of the universe.
All human belief systems are inherently flawed.
There’s nothing in the actual Bible that limits a Christian in their appreciation of or interest in science. Anti-science is purely a function of ignorant fundamentalism.
My goal with everything that I do is to present things in a way that I would want to see if I was in the audience or buying the record.
My goal is to make one-not a hodgepodge, but just the sort of record that I would want to listen to.
One problem with a lot of musicians is that they remove themselves in a studio and make a record and assume people are going to pay attention to it just because they’ve made it.