I take my craft very seriously.
People just expect you to show up, be a cartoon character of yourself, take your money and go home. But don't screw up to the point where you're gonna be out of the picture.
I want to be 'Jimmy Chamberlin, the drummer, the musician who's done many things,' not just 'that guy from the Smashing Pumpkins.'
Even though I'm a jazz-trained drummer, I cut my teeth playing rock.
Today's consumer is less interested in possessing things and more in experiencing them. That's something the music industry needs to get its head around. Do we even need record companies any more?
What I see for the band by the end of this year is the Complex live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I want my guys to be comfortable. I'm certainly not in this for the money, but I'd really like to see my guys make some money off of this stuff.
I left the Pumpkins in 2010, and I just took a year off to hang with my family and be with my daughter and my son and my wife, and just get acclimatised to being off the road. Then I started looking at what was going to be the next part of my career/legacy, whatever you want to call it.
I can't take days off and play like I did last night. Maybe some people can, but I can't.
You start to look at it with a deeper respect and I think that deeper respect for what you do builds more self-respect.
When I'm at home I practice everyday.
The thing I try to do the most is to play in terms of the song and play in terms of what I'm hearing.
The lyrics came out of necessity. When we started writing the record, we started in a more fusion environment and that got boring really quick and that wasn't what we were about on an organic level.
No one writes about the emotional things you go through.
My brother was always in bands and on the road when I was a kid and he was my inspiration. He never made it with a big band, in fact he never made a record. Here he is fifty-something years old.
My brother and I had a real love-hate relationship with my success. There was some bitterness there that I didn't understand until recently, but I told him that if I ever did a record I wanted him to play on it.
If you put the right things out there the right things will happen.
If you can get a twelve year-old kid to go listen to Thelonius Monk, what more do you want? Do you want a big pile of cash, too? That's a home run for me.
I've always seen my drumming as lyrical anyway.
I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.
I feel really good in the teacher role.
