I am no one to be a purist.

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.

We just wanna be the happy bums that we are. That's all.

Trey Spruance didn't want to tour for ages. And Dean Menta has always been our guitar-roadie during Angel Dust, and I remember him playing fantastically during soundchecks. During each gig, he was watching from the side of the stage, seeing Big Jim play stuff that he could play better.

I don't know why, but there's a certain element of panic in writing lyrics that I'm not sure I enjoy. I don't write lyrics first, ever. I've never done that. So, in a sense, the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought - it's music first.

If a person wants to be atheistic it's his God-given right to be an atheist.

I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.