I remember as a kid that I was always physically fit.
I prefer not to use any machines. I focus a lot on cardio, which is what I do when I'm on stage. I also am into isometric workouts.
For years, I wasn't feeling good about myself. My head wasn't clear. I was doing nothing productive.
I'm a huge fan of film and always have been.
I learned to read music when I was 10 and did piano and took lessons.
I had kind of a mean piano teacher. I went to Catholic school, so it was like the typical thing you would imagine - a little kid with a white-haired teacher frowning at the fact that I didn't practice.
Definitely, when you get into something where bands are playing for 30,000 people, it's not like the post-punk, U.S. independent scene.
'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.
'Spoonman' wasn't written for any album. It was just written for fun.
As a child, I was this record collector/listener that would sit in a room and listen to the entire Beatles catalog alone, over and over and over again.
I never thought of myself as being the singer that wanted to create an identity and then stick to that.
My history of singing has always probably been closer to a David Bowie approach than, for example, an AC/DC approach.
There was no animosity in the breakup of Soundgarden.
Oftentimes, especially in the context of an acoustic song, I'm motivated to write by some amount of melancholy.
I'm interested in where I'm going and the people I am there to see. Going to Cuba was a great example of that, and the succession of going into Cuba, which is not a very easy place to get into, and playing music for people who have never seen a live rock concert outdoors like that.
When you see a country take care of its people regardless of class, or how much money they make, or what color they are, that's pretty inspiring.
I got a GED based on Catholic school seventh-grade education, really. I didn't make it that far.
Some of the most brilliant things that someone might do could happen in three minutes because it's something that just occurs to them. And then, there's the example of really chipping away at something to create something great. I don't believe that one is more reliable than the other.
There's this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you're over-thinking the songwriting process. There's no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that's going to produce a better result, especially in the arts.
That's the miracle of music. No one can reinterpret a Picasso, but a song can be remixed and covered and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It's a living thing.
