Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
I always loved art shows at schools. My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It's some of my favorite art... It's more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.
Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig.
I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
I didn't want to do something typical.
I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.
I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.
In the past it seemed like I was making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I'm not technically a rapper, whatever that means.
In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments.
There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.
There's never any pressure on the music having to be something.
There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.
When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.
You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.
I love British humor. It's just so - surreal.
I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.
The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing.
There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.
