Drumming was the only thing I was ever good at.
There was always a guitar hanging around the house when I was a kid. It was a much lower impact instrument than me playing the drums, which is what I really wanted to do. My mother put a stop to the drumming.
But I was in the Radiohead studio today and Phil was there drumming and Thom was there playing. We feel like we've only just stopped and already people are wanting us to carry on.
They're always saying I'm a capitalistic pig. I suppose I am. But... it's good for my drumming.
Being a drummer definitely influences how I play guitar. And then piano influences drumming and vice versa.
When you're writing, you're only a brain and some fingers, but drumming, you're involving all four limbs, and you're hearing stuff and you're converting your ideas into physical motions, getting physical feedback from things you are touching - it's pretty cool. It's a really a nice contrast to writing.
Egyptian drumming happens to be a favorite of mine. It's a really simple instrument, but it's really difficult to play. You can take it anywhere with you - you can play it in your room, in an airport. It's very quiet, so you explore the quiet side.
I guess I did make my name out of my drumming, and I have the big drum sets, and I'm doing all these crazy, odd-time signatures, so, yeah, I guess drumming was very important to what made me popular.
There's the drums, the music, the melodies, the lyrics, the production, the artwork: there are so many elements to making an album, and the drumming is just a very small fraction of what I focus on.
With the Neal Morse Band, we're doing progressive music with a harder edge; it's a little more in Dream Theater territory for me. Flying Colors is a little more poppy, it's more Radiohead, Muse, and Coldplay territory, so I approach that drumming in a different way.
