Musical types tend to combine the burden of the author with the burden of the actor.

Miami's not anybody's poor cousin. It's an aspiration to live in this town, not something you have to do to promote yourself like some of the larger cities.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

I like music that's more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.

I'd have a few on and off, but the commitment was always more on the girls' part than on mine, to be perfectly honest. So, I met a girl in Tokyo, on my Japanese tour, with whom I've been living ever since, very happily. Her name is Suchi.

Well, after Zombie Birdhouse came out, I toured behind it in the fall of 1982, into the spring, and in the summer in the Far East. At that time, I found my work self-referential; it was getting to be rock songs about a rock singer who lived a rock life on the rock road, and I was starting to wonder what I would be like to rent my own apartment, what it would be like to have a checkbook.

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.