I've had insomnia since I was a little kid and I never sleep well. Sometimes I sleep very badly and sometimes I sleep slightly badly. I get it especially when I'm on tour because you cross a lot of time zones, and I'm not very adaptable.
The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'
I have actually found myself buying up more and more old analogue gear. I have this strange obsession with old drum machines.
There are a lot of great animal rights organizations who save dogs and save cats, but the Humane Society is actually really good at working with Congress and getting legislation actually passed.
I made a record in 1996 called 'Animal Rights' that was a very difficult, very dark punk-rock record. Of all the records I've made, it's my favorite one. It's also the one that got the worst reviews and sold the worst.
There are a lot of people in the animal rights movement who can be very passionate and aggressive, and I applaud people's passion, but when people are judgmental and aggressive, all you end up doing is getting other people to turn away in irritation. To change people's minds, you have to respect the people you're talking to.
It's sometimes too easy to point fingers when circumstances dramatically go awry, but as an addict, I'm ultimately responsible for my own decisions, no matter how benign or tragic the consequences.
If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.
'Arbitrary' and 'odd' are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I'm perpetually baffled by the whole thing.
Growing up in Connecticut, all the Colonial houses looked alike. In Los Angeles, the diversity is so extreme, it's baffling.
The term 'renaissance man' is always bandied about. I don't think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.
Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.
What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.
Shaving your head is acceptable. It's when you start wearing toupees and brushing your hair over that things go wrong.
When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.
A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.
If someone is cynical and doesn't vote and ends up with a crummy job in a crummy country with a decimated environment, they only have themselves to blame.
Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.
