Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody's different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous.

You can beat the drum so hard that people stop listening. I wanted to use my voice wisely and not expend it wastefully.

Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk.

If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they're beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance.

The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul.

The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band.

What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.