Quotes from the book Inside The Music by Dimitri Ehrlich (interview done December 17, 1994 after the Tower Records show...you can also read his review of the show here)
"What I'd love is if a deejay had a lineup of songs, and he'd just use one of my songs as part of a really nice evening. But that's the way I would deejay, not the way they do it. They usually have playlists."
"If it happens it'd be great, but we just play to express. I want to live my life playing music, so that we can be immersed in it. In order to learn how deep it goes, you have to be in it." (About making a lot of money and selling records)
"The way I experience a performance is that there's an exchange going on. It's not just my ego being fed. It's thoughts and feelings. Raw expression has its own knowledge and wisdom. I've been in their position before and all I wanted to do was to show my appreciation for the performer. So I feel like it's kind of generous of them to even be asking me for an autograph.
"It's true that there's also the people who want a piece of you, but it's pretty hard to keep feeling protected all the time, because there's really nothing to protect yourself against. Sometimes people shout at me on the street, and they feel they know me through my music. But that doesn't substitute for a real personal relationship. I don't feel like people know me, I just think we share a love for music in common, and for some reason they key into the way I play. I feel appreciative when people come up to me, and I feel good when we connect. Usually, it serves as a nice comedown after a performance. Any other conduct would bust the groove, because I'm buzzing when I get offstage, and I'm consciously protecting that connection because that's what got me through the performance in the first place. It's an invocation and worship of this certain feeling, this direct line to your heart, and somehow music dies that more powerfully than anything else. It's like a total, immediate elixir."
"Playing with a band is all about accepting a bond, accepting everything the way it is. It takes a lot patience and a lot of taking chances with each other. It takes seeing each other in weak and strong lights, and accepting both, and utilizing the high and low points of your relationship."
"It's not like music begins or ends. All kinds of sounds are working into each other. Sometimes I'll just stop on the street because there's a sequence of sirens going on; it's like a melody I'll never hear again. In performance, things can be meaningful or frivolous, but either way the musical experience is totally spontaneous, and new life comes out of it, meaning if you're open to hearing the way music interacts with ambient sound, performance never feels like a rote experience. It's pretty special sometimes, the way a song affects a room, the way you're in complete rhythm with the song. When you're emotionally overcome, and there's no filter between what you say and what you mean, your language becomes guttural, simple, emotional, and full of pictures and clarity. Were you to transcribe it, it might not make sense, but music is a totally different language."
"People talk all day in a practical way, but real language that penetrates and affects people and carries wisdom is something different. Maybe it's the middle of the afternoon and you see a child's moon up on the sky, and you feel like it's such a simple, pure, wonderful thing to look at. It just hits you in a certain way, and you point it out to a stranger, and he looks at you like you're weird and walks away. To speak that way, to point out a child's moon to a stranger, is original language, it's the way you originate yourself. And the cool thing is, if you catch people at the right moment, it's totally clear. Without knowing why, it's simply clear. That sort of connection is very empirical. It comes from the part of you that just understand immediately. All these types of things are gold, and yet they are dishonored or not paid attention to because that kind of tender communication is so alien in our culture except in performance. There's a wall up between people all day long, but performance transcends that convention. If pop music were really seen as fine art or if fine art were popular, I don't know what the hell would happen-this wouldn't be the same country, because if the masses of people began to respect and really open to fine art, it would bring about a huge shift in consciousness.
"Music is so many things. It's not just the performer. It's the audience and the architecture of the song, and each builds off the other. Music is a setting for poignancy, anger, destruction, total disaster, total wrongness, and then-like a little speck of gold in the middle of it-excitement, but excitement in a way that matters. Excitement that is not just aesthetically pleasing but shoots some sort of understanding into you."
"Hearing a song is like meeting somebody. A song is something that took time to grow and once it's there, it's on its own. Every time you perform it, it's different. It has it's own structure, and you have to flow through it, and it has to come through you."
"There is a distinct separation of sensibility between art as commerce and art as a way of life. If you buy into one too heavily it eats up the other. If instead of having songs happen as your life happens, you're getting a song together because you need a certain number of songs on a release to be sold, the juice is sucked out immediately. That approach kills it."
"I just wanted to learn certain things. I wanted to explore like a kid with crayons. It took awhile for me to get a record contact, but it also took a tremendous amount of time for me to feel comfortable playing, and that's all I was concerned with. And I'm still concerned with that, mainly."
"I don't think about my responsibility as a musician in terms of any kind of religious significance. I don't have any allegiance to an organized religion; I have an allegiance to the gifts that I find for myself in those religions. They seem to be saying the same thing, they just have different mythologies and expressions, but the dogma of religions and the way they're misused is all too much of a trap. I'd rather be non-denominational, except through music. I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It's the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real. But I don't believe in a big guy with a beard on a throne, telling us that we're bad; I certainly don't believe in original sin. I believe in the opposite of that: you have an Eden immediately from the time you are born, but as you are conditioned by your caretakers and your surroundings, you may lose that original thing. Your task is to get back to it, so you can claim responsibility for your own perfection."
"I think of it as trying to get more aligned with the feeling of purity in music, however it sounds. I think music is prayer. Sometimes people make up prayers and they don't even know it. They just make up a song that has rhyme and meter, and once it's made, it can carry on a life of its own. It can have a lot of juice to it and a lot of meaning: there's no end to the different individual flavors that people can bring to the musical form.
"In order to make the music actual, you have to enable it to be. And that takes facing some things inside you that constrict you, your own impurity and mistakes and blockages. As you open up yourself, the music opens up in different directions that lead you in yet other directions."
"The only valuable thing about selling records, the only thing that matters, is that people connect and that you keep on growing. You do make choices based on how many people you reach, meaning, now that I have a relationship with strangers worldwide, I have to try not to let it become too much of a factor and just accept it. The limited success we've had in the past is definitely a factor, it's just there. It just is. The whole thing is such crapshoot, you can't really control what your appeal is gonna be. My music ain't gonna make it into the malls, but it doesn't matter. I don't really care to make it into the malls.
"Whether I sell a lot of records or not isn't up to me. You can sell a lot of records, but that's just a number sold-that's not understood, or loved, or cherished.
"Take someone like Michael Jackson. Early on he sacrificed himself to be loved by all. His talent and his power were so great that he got what he wanted but he also got a direct, negative result, which is that he's not able to grow into an adult human being. And that's why his music sounds sort of empty and weird.
"Being the kind of person I am, fame is really overwhelming. First of all, just being faced with the questions that everybody faces: Do I matter? Should I go on? Why am I here? Is this really that important? All that low self-esteem shit. You're constantly trying to make sure that your sense of self-worth doesn't depend on the writings or opinions of other people. You have to wean yourself off acclaim as the object of your work, by learning to depend on your own judgement and knowing what it is you that you enjoy. You have to realize what the difference is between being adored and being loved and understood. Big difference.
"I don't really have super-pointed answers to the big questions. I'm in the middle of a mystery myself. I'm not even that developed at having a real psycho-religious epistemology about what I feel. All I can tell you is that that I feel. It's just the same old fight to constantly be aware. It's an ongoing thing. It'll never be a static perfect thing or a static mediocre thing, it just has its rise and fall."
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