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I'm 24, and a lot of people my age grew up listening to bands that were big and making it from around here. I was going to Flaming Lips and Chainsaw Kittens concerts when I was 12, and getting my mind blown at a young age... and maybe for people in bands, there's irreparable damage from those kind of things, and it turns out weirder bands.
Josh JonesI definitely prefer to be in a band. There's too many solo people, and bands are suffering. There's too many great bands that have split up because somebody's got an ego, and then he goes solo.
Liam GallagherFor music, I always just played music myself - and, I had rock bands and wrote songs and put bands together that were loud, but not especially good. That was sort of the place music had in my career.
Michael CerverisAs many bands as you heard [in New Orleans], that's how many bands you heard playing right. I thought I was in Heaven playing second trumpet in the Tuxedo Brass Band -- and they had some funeral marches that would just touch your heart, they were so beautiful.
Louis ArmstrongThat's always attractive to me, to work with music whose form is a big question mark. Even many of my favorite bands growing up, when I was just a kid learning to play drums and guitar and everything, were bands like Pink Floyd, where the arrangement, the number of bars in each section is unconventional and often lopsided, and there will be small little instrumental interludes and that sort of thing. So those odd forms, as well as dark content, are the things that I think are continuous through all the type of projects that I've been attracted to.
Charlie ClouserAll the universes are bound together by a web, a matrix, which is our perception. And our perception actually has colors; it has bands. We call them bands of attention.
Frederick LenzI like going to see live bands. Live bands can be quite heavy, but I think it's very relaxing at the same time because you feel so happy and chilled-out.
Ed SpeleersSex is more openly spoken about than 40, 50 years ago, and I think probably in comparison to a lot of bands - certainly other contemporary pop girl bands - we're certainly not as suggestive. We talk about sex in the way that we would to our friends. As a girl group, I think it was important not to avoid those sort of things either, because it's about confronting people's idea of what women should be talking about and how they should talk about it. There's no point in shying away from subjects like that, because they exist.
GwennoA lot of bands are going out and playing for nothing. A lot of bands will go out and get paid, but the gas tank will eat up their paycheck. When they manage to sell a t-shirt or two, there is a little bit of leftover money there so that they don't have to have McDonalds that day. They can actually eat something decent with possibly a bit of cash leftover. It's a huge part of the business now.
Matt SnellPunk rock really influenced me, the basic metal bands, Zeppelin, Stones and Floyd, and Southern rock bands. I think I was pretty well-rounded.
Al JourgensenI have been doing merch' since I was 15 and in bands when I was a teenager - silk-screening shirts, making the emulsion in my mom's closet I converted into a dark room, through college. That's essentially how us bands survived was selling homemade t-shirts.
Steve AokiAll the bands get along really well. That's one of the biggest things on a tour. It's great to get all these cool bands together, but if they don't get along it sucks.
Brandon ThomasI'm finding it hard to listen to other rock bands. It's been hard for me for a long time, but now I can't listen to any new bands at all.
Matt TongWhen I was young I wanted to make films and then I got into folk music when I was about 12, and started going to this folk club in Auckland. My dad [Barry Andrews] was in punk and post-punk bands, so I guess it was a side of music I hadn't really listened to before - the really narrative form of songwriting.
Finn AndrewsI agree with you about the music of today. It lacks style and emotion. I can't relate to it either, as for grunge music, well that was the death kneel for a lot of the glam metal hair bands of the 80's, so I really do not care for grunge. I miss the 80's as well, it was a truly great decade for music.
Vinnie VincentI have been influenced by many different artists at many different stages of my life. Starting out, it was people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Fiona Apple. As I got older I got deeper into the work of bands like the Beatles, artists like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Etta James, and Joni Mitchell.
Sara BareillesYou hear about bands who say, "We did one show where only 20 people showed up", well that was our average gig for five years.
Dexter HollandI didn't know anything about fashion, growing up in Orange County. I just knew about it through music, how ska bands dressed.
Gwen StefaniI was sixteen, I became a working guitar player gigging in LA, mostly in top 40 bands, then touring. I learned to take songs apart, down to their bones. Songwriters would hire me to produce their demos, which lead me to become a songwriter. The relationship and power music has to TV and film attracted me to composing [and] I learned to write for instruments other than guitar.
Danny JacobI've liked music since I can remember and the guitar was always the most attractive thing about music to me at that time. I played guitar in a high school band. I played guitar in various other bands up until I was 20, but nothing too serious. From time to time someone would ask me to play with a group, but I stopped playing with band-oriented projects as a whole soon after.
Kevin DrummWe had punks literally protesting Fugazi. I respect a boycott. I respect a conscionable boycott, but of all bands to boycott? Fight crime. If you really want to get out there, go fight crime.
Ian MacKayeAs far as the bands that are reforming now, it's always nice to see old friends and hear some of those great songs, but it's just not our thing.
Ian MacKayeIf you're working with a band and you really want to work them into the episode, you've got to say to them, "Look, we need you around every day and on Tuesday night all night because we need you to do voices as we're changing stuff." We do the show so quickly, and you just can't get bands to do that. It's not really fair.
Matt StoneThe pirating thing is bad. The people it hurts the most are the ones you least think it hurts. It's not the big Britney Spears albums that are being pirated; it's the indie bands that don't have two cents to their name
Rob ZombieEven when I was coming through school I was a loner and I used to study music and listen to it and play it and play it, and I was in bands.
Billy WestDon't believe bands who say it's all about the fans and they want to give their music away for free. The result is they will continue to live in their mother's basement.
Gene SimmonsThere are two types of bands - there are the ones that are basically solo projects anyways, where there's clearly the one guy who's driving the ship and everyone else is just along for the ride. And then there was my band, where you have a few very disparate-taste, creative people who kind of meet in the middle somewhere.
Patrick StumpI got more bands and went on the road and turn down more movies than you would believe.
Sally KellermanIn my bands, I don't really walk around telling people what to play, just out of respect really. I mean, if there's something I feel in my gut, I'll bring it up.
Jack WhiteI mean I think that Blondie's influence is a little bit in a way more eclectic than those bands.
Debbie HarryBands are about these little relationships that make everything tick, and when you create new music you're testing those relationships.
Jonathan CainI understand why some women/girls/ladies don't want to be women-identified 'cuz it totally complicates your band identity and no one seems to pay much attention to the music or what you're doing. We have chosen to be girl-identified (although Billy isn't a girl!), because we want to encourage other women/girls to play music. When I was growing up, I found it discouraging to have all these women in bands not wanting to address the issue of gender...we're interested in what women are doing.
Tobi VailOf course, the world is different now. There's a glut of comedians with specials, so it's just not possible to make an impact the way Bill Cosby: Himself did. It's like, The Beatles were amazing, but it also helped that not many bands were putting out albums then.
Christian FinneganAfter watching a couple of live performances of bands like Nirvana, I was really excited and inspired by how raw and powerful it was. I wanted to at least aim in that direction with the guitar and do my own version of it. I know it doesn't really sound like that on the other end, but I wanted guitar, heavy rhythms, and singing to be the stamp of the whole thing.
Panda BearI've been in bands since I was about fifteen, so there are probably quite a lot of terrible teenage songs kicking about somewhere. I'm not sure what it was about to be honest, I think it was probably just something along the lines of teen angst.
Lauren MayberrySo when bands work with me and it's 10 o'clock, usually you'd have to be getting out of the studio, we could go on until 2 in the morning cause it's my place!
Billy SherwoodI feel that bands can do whatever they want, after all, they own themselves and the art/music they create.
Jacob BannonI'm just not a big fan of the too-cool-for-school indie world. Metal bands have never been invited or been able to be part of the cool kids, and I like it that way.
Scott IanI didn't want to make a record that's just drones or completely experimental. A lot of the time bands that make this psychedelic style of music are just a bunch of dudes hanging out together and jamming.
TamarynI think people probably lie about not reading their own reviews. I don't think that's true - I've been to a lot of music festivals and hung out backstage, especially in the past couple of years, and I see all these bands reading about themselves in newspapers. So I don't think that's true.
Lily AllenI think there was a brief period where Norwegian bands were evolving and that was an interesting time where it seemed like a band like Darkthrone was stuck in the midst of a lot of change and seemed a bit redundant.
Mat McNerneyOn the whole, it bums me out that lyrics seem to be written as afterthoughts nowadays. Not sure why this is, but hopefully things will come around again and bands will once again want to "communicate" "ideas" with their audience, and not just content themselves with providing attitude and atmosphere with clichรฉs on top.
Wooden WandWhat I love about analogue is it really forces you to go for a performance. I hear these young bands play perfect and they've been manipulated so much that there's not much personality to them. It's taken away some of the rawness and immediacy you get from a human performance.
Butch Vig