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I lived in Italy for a number of years and I was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the '50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented pop singers that weren't using pop bands.
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The song is based on a lot of observation and a lot of speculation. But in sort of a pointed way its kind of about Madonna...I think it was a particular time where I was being bombarded with her image on TV and in magazines and her whole schtick kind of speaks to me in that way...like she's going through some sort of problem. It seems she's getting a bit desperate.
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That's one of the great things about touring. It makes you machinelike in a way that you can re-create this music not only in the right way but even better than when it was conceived.
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The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea and I can pretty much execute it. As old as I am now and as long as I've been doing it, I can pretty much get it done in a week. While a filmmaker has a great idea that should be out tomorrow, but he has to go through this process of getting financing, then selling it, then casting. I've always been in awe of filmmakers and their patience in realizing their vision because I could never do that.
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Imperial Teen is more like four people who like each other playing music.
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I learned what I could do with my voice on stages and because of the people that I was around. It wasn't me sitting in a room by myself. I didn't know what I was doing. I was figuring it out on the fly.
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Stan Slaughter is the thoroughbred of the environmental educators I've hired. Second place is not even close.
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Quantitative methods are no more synonymous with objectivity than qualitative methods are synonymous with subjectivity.
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I am no one to be a purist.
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I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.
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I guess I'm getting to the age where a lot of other people my age have real jobs, and when they're hard-up they refer to an old-timer like me.
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I never really got any backlash from coming out. Across the board all I really got was kids who were grateful, which is so touching and rewarding for me. So grateful that I came out, that I could serve as someone in their world that was gay and helped them feel comfortable about being gay themselves.
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I got one entire song from fortune cookies. On another one, I took words from different Frank Sinatra songs and pasted them together. Another one, I was just driving around and there was a piece of paper on the ground, so I stole it.
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Diamanda Galás, the avant-weird performance artist... 'The devil's wife,' someone calls her. Faith No More loves Diamanda Galás.
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If a person wants to be atheistic it's his God-given right to be an atheist.
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We just wanna be the happy bums that we are. That's all.
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Any idiot, any stockbroker can get out there and live out a fantasy and pretend like he's playing music. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
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There have been crazy highs and lows in my life. I've duelled with drug addiction and watched people dying... like everybody. I'm not saying it's an exceptionally dramatic peaks-and-valleys kind of life but there's a lot of it, honestly.
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If someone were to hire me for a film they'd be getting a certain kind of package, that's for sure, a certain set of tools. But I would listen to the director.
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Puffy's the only guy who's jealous. All drummers want to be singers. I think it's a myth that the singer needs to be the focus. Bands perpetuate that myth. With somebody like Sebastian Bach it makes sense. Look at him. He could be in an Avon ad.
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I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.
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Revenge is good. I think revenge is healthy too, and if you can use music in that way, a sort of therapeutic way for yourself, it can't do any harm. So if King is angry in any way, it's angry in a random, chaotic, healthy way. Like the guy who goes into a building, shoots a bunch of holes in the wall and then leaves. He didn't kill anybody.
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The studio is my main compositional tool. And I used to be horrible in the studio. I didn't know any kind of technical stuff. But when you have something in your head, you've gotta figure out a way of executing it.
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Trey Spruance didn't want to tour for ages. And Dean Menta has always been our guitar-roadie during Angel Dust, and I remember him playing fantastically during soundchecks. During each gig, he was watching from the side of the stage, seeing Big Jim play stuff that he could play better.