Do you feel there is no ceiling to learning your instrument, or that you will never stop changing or improving?

It fluctuates. Certain things you get better at, and certain things you get worse at. It is crazy. You lose some stamina…this crazy frantic energy. You gain some other knowledges. It goes all around until your body gives up I think. In a lot of ways, I get weirder. So that is good. I just do crazier shit that is more impressive to the outside, technically or something.

Do you have a period of time that you felt was your best or most favorite musically?

I am doing great now. I’m telling you. I made up forty-five songs in that short time. You would have to hear them. It is nuts. It is not what would expect from someone who has been writing and recording in a studio since they were 12-years old. To be forty-eight and knock out that many good songs…

If you could offer any sort of advice or insight to a young musician on a quest to create, what would it be?

Metaphorically there are a couple different things. It does not matter how hard you row your boat. If there is a hole in it and you cannot bail water faster than the water is coming, then you are going to sink. So it is really appropriate to understand what is going on. It does not matter how hard you practice or how hard you’re working. If your band is not going to work, then it is not going to work. If you have a shitty band name, you are just working against yourself. It is almost better, than renting a rehearsal space, to spend a year thinking of a really good fucking band name. It is the same thing about your record cover. You have got to go to a real record store and look at everybody’s record and go, “Man I better have a good fucking idea because why would anybody want to buy a shitty idea?” It is not good enough to be like, “Oh my sister drew this and I like this.” You have to think about everybody else…the whole fucking world.

Would you say that goes against what you were saying about not worrying about others?

Well, you can be practical. You gotta be weird, see. You gotta have a theory about what you are doing, but you should still be aware of what everybody else is doing.’ I cannot tell you how many great drummers I have known that are all in really shitty bands. What is the fucking point? Everybody gets along and they are all good musicians, but the music is fucking horrible. Then they get to be about thirty and they sell their drum set. Why? Why did you not just figure out what is going on with it. So it is really important. It does matter how hard you row your boat. You can work as hard as you want, but if it’s a bad idea it is not going to work. People do that with restaurants all the time! People work their fucking ass off and they got no one in there, and you look at the sign and everything they’re doing. It is just stupid.

There is a restaurant across the street from my house in Berlin that I would see close down every couple months. One time it was called, Steaks & Friends or some shit. What the fuck? I would just call it, Eat, Motherfucker. In Germany you can actually say that. You can because if it is not in German you can say motherfucker on your business sign because it is not in German. So, you are not cussing. You can just call your restaurant Eat Motherfucker with a giant neon sign and everyone would think it was funny and not obscene because it’s not in German.

Have you observed any changes in your musical style over the years? 1997 versus now?

A few times I really wanted to make up something so much, but that is kind of in the wrong headspace—that is, when you are desperate to make something. It is such a stupid thing in comparison to just enjoying making something for its own reason. The same situation will lead me to a different outcome. If I am just making up music as much as I can and there is an overabundance of it, I do not have to use everything. That is how I originally taught myself how to play everything. If I make up a country song or something it was not that I wanted to be a country singer. It was just that I wanted to teach myself music. I had seen Hee Haw as a kid or whatever. My grandma was into that stuff. So I kinda knew how everything sounded, like the slide guitar.

You have a high capacity to produce a lot of music at once. How does it start for you?

A lot of times I hear whole things. Even when we were recording, we would be working on something, and I’d say, “Hold on, I’m working on something, and it is a totally different thing.” That quick. If I am already recording a bunch of stuff I would think, ‘What is that song I’m hearing?’ Then I would realize it was me. I would hear the whole thing, but there is no thought process of, “Where does this go?” For example, I was working on a song for this Italian actress, and I was thinking in my head, “This has to go longer and crazier because it does this weird thing.” So, I was doing the math in my head, of how does this real, French sixties sounding thing, like a movie, go even more, and still make the math work? But I wasn’t playing, just in my head. It could be any instrument, and all of them have their own song. Even each guitar. The tones. The bass. When I play bass, or when I play drums, the organ, It all has its own gift or whatever to offer. You just kinda run with it.

I like to think of a song as a saga. There are so many different parts.

Yeah, exactly. That is a symphonic mentality. Not everybody even has that. You can also do that with your whole body of work, whether it’s a set or a record. Each song can be like the bridge or the chorus, and then, the refrain. A whole album can be like the two hands of the chords on a piano. The notes go up to harmonize in this secret way that only you can see. Such as, this one is in this key, and this next song is in this key, but it harmonizes. So secretly it makes the brain, for the listener, listen to it as a whole. It is a more satisfying thing. That is what these guys and ladies that are symphonic composers all realize when they make these whole movements in a symphony. They already see it that way. It could be organic. We could say the guy that invented the piano never took piano lessons. If we go back farther, the guy or gal that invented the flute did not take flute lessons. It is this organic knowledge. You got to know you can do it, and encourage yourself in a real private way. Inspire yourself.

Why make music?

I do all kinds of stuff, but this is one thing that I enjoy.

Over the years have there been any recurring interpretations of the band that have bothered you, something that you think people did not get?

Ultimately I am going to have the last laugh because if nobody gets it, then nobody gets it. I am a firm believer that artists and certain type of people should just leave a beautiful mess, for people to figure out what it means to them. That is just what is going to happen anyways. Everybody else, the detractors, it does not matter. My work is going to outlive their critiques. The bottom line is it is not going to go away so it doesn’t matter what anyone says. They like it. They don’t like it. They don’t know about it. They don’t know what to think about it. None of it matters because in a hundred years it will be the next set of people with their own set of feelings.

Is it the same feeling permeating through the eons, that everyone is just trying to grab onto?

Well, a certain thing can be a full spectrum of human emotions, or the universe and everything in it. That thing can be infinite.

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