I disoriented myself from everything about being a human being and just played and played and played and sang and sang and sang.
I figured if I played in the no-man's land of intimacy, I would learn to be a performer.
I've already created my own thing.
I don't see myself in an ivory tower.
I'm convinced I got signed because of who I am. And it makes me sad.
I made a statement all my own.
I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship.
I don't want my reputation to take me over, I just want to be judged on my songs. I want people to come and see me because they want to, not because fashion dictates it.
I've always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content of a song lies. Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience.
A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it.
The Smiths hasn't been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.
In my early shows, I wanted to put myself through a new childhood, disintegrating my whole identity to let the real one emerge.
I don't want to do any more covers. It's good to learn to make things your own, but the education's over. 'Grace' is putting a lot of things to rest.
Critics try to pin so many different inaccuracies on me and my music; they look at the complicated things and try to simplify them. They think they can nail your whole life down just by knowing the bare bones of your history in partaking in 10 minutes of conversation.
There was a time when I stopped singing, between 16 and 19, but that was done on purpose, maybe as a punishment, maybe as a cure.
The music comes from within and outside. Within is the big mystery of life; we've all got it.
I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13.
I think that all people are many people. I think all people have many, many, many different souls inside, and they just shift from one to the other.
Life's too short and too complicated for people behind desks, people behind masks to be ruining other people's lives, initiating force against other people's lives on the basis of their income, their color, their class, their religious beliefs, whatever.
'Grace' is basically a death prayer. Not something of sorrow, but of just casting away any fear of death. No relief will come - you really just have to stew in your life until it's time to go. But sometimes, somebody else's faith in you can do wonders.
