I like to quote Homer Simpson: ‘I’m like a chocoholic except for alcohol.’ I come from a long line of alcoholics. It’s funny because when I first started making records, I was at the tail end of a period of sobriety, so I somehow got this reputation as Captain Sober.
For my most of my career I’ve been a falling-down drunk. Most of my interviews were done hungover, and for a while it was great.
I’m sure most people have this experience: when you’re young you drink, you do drugs, you stay up late, and there are no consequences.
I saw people around me who were falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism and substance abuse. It’s seductive because alcohol is amazing and drugs are amazing, they work so well.
To quote Homer Simpson, alcohol is the cause and solution to all of life’s problems. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking and drug use, if people can do it and not hurt themselves. But it got to the point where I was really hurting myself.
I would drink and drink and then at 3 o’clock in the morning take anything that was put in front of me. And I’d sometimes be disappointed when conventional things were put in front of me. Like, I’d do a line of something and be disappointed to find it was just cocaine.
When Britney shaves off all her hair and beats paparazzi with umbrellas – that’s what celebrities are supposed to do. They’re not supposed to be reasonable, middle-aged guys drinking organic tea talking about semiotics.
I’ve done the performing monkey stuff and massive breakdowns, it’s just they weren’t documented.
I’ve had my Charlie Sheen moments, it was usually just at the Mars Bar on the corner of First Avenue with me and a few homeless guys.
I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent – and I can’t really complain because I’m sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.
When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery.
My interest in gospel music and liturgical art and Biblically-inspired literature has nothing to do with organised religion and everything to do with human beings trying to figure out their place on this planet.
When I listen to gospel singers pouring their heart out to God, it’s the act of pouring their hearts out that interests me.
I’m not Catholic but the Virgin Mary fascinates me because she’s like a folk hero.
Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don’t know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that’s what inspires my interest.
I’d rather be around broken people who have a degree of humility, and just get on with their work.
There is a dysfunctional strangeness to Los Angeles that doesn’t exist in any other western city. The roads are crumbling, no-one knows what they’re doing, the city government barely works.
You can’t find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it’s rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions – but I’m ten minutes from the centre of the city.
Musicians, actors, writers – we’re all neurotic, odd people who’ve lucked into accidental careers. So I just don’t like being around public figures with that sense of entitlement, it just seems unhealthy, and it strips so much potential for them to develop as a human being.
The worst case scenario is you really like someone’s work, then you meet them and they’re a self-involved, entitled douchebag.