Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can't get it out, I start feeling bad about myself - a lot of self-loathing.
I'm a self-taught guitarist, but I have a classical music background.
I started off with violin, then I started learning guitar, then I went to piano. But I self-taught piano just because I enjoyed it. I've always really enjoyed music.
I was on a path that could've really led to disaster, and the one thing for me that really kept me focused and gave me something to believe in and a sense of self-worth and a discipline was music.
Just sharing music with each other - that's cool. It's the selling that becomes the problem.
When I started playing music, people weren't selling 5 million records. That was not the standard; that was not the focus.
In the old days, a TV sync was perceived as not so cool or whittling away at your indie cred. Now it's seen as much more of an opportunity than a sellout, as a way to find fans who wouldn't have ordinarily come across their genre of music.
It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.
You don't need to be a performer in order to dive into the sensory experience of music. Simply get as close as you can to the source of the music.
When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.
Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Music can make the cerebral accessible, the subconscious hummable. It communicates our shared needs and desires as sentient beings better than any other medium.
I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.
The thing with Joy Division's music is that each member was playing like a separate line. We hardly ever played together; we all played separately. But when you put it together, it was like the ingredients in a cake.
Traditionally, music has been a means of separating ourselves as people from another group of people.
I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
When I have trouble sleeping, I'll read, watch old episodes of 'Sex and the City,' or dance around my house. Music helps me wind down.
I held in being sexually attracted to women for so long that once I got that out of me, the music became easy.
To me, the art of music is magnificent, and I cannot bear to see it treated in a shabby way.
I'm just not into the shady side of the music industry. Give credit where credit's due.
