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I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.
Lots of people can have girlfriends. But I can throw around guitars onstage! That'll be my epitaph: 'He never had a girlfriend, but you should've seen him smash a Les Paul!'
My moral standing is lying down.
I want to do something that matters.
If you have something to say, then say it. Express yourself and break the rules.
I didn't want to be in a Pepsi commercial with R2-D2 sitting on my shoulder.
Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.
I hated school . . . I freaking hated it. The fact is that it revolved around something you didn't have access to. If you weren't on the football team, if you were in the band, you were a leper. When people say those were the best years of our lives, I want to scream.
When I was around Bowie, I was nearing the bottom. When we were touring together, I looked at him as a kind of big-brother figure and I also looked at him as somebody I had a lot of respect for. The age and the period he's at in his life, I'd like to be there some day. He has a kind of content peace about him that's something to shoot for.
Bowie mattered to me. He reinvented himself so many times - it must have been a daring statement to do that, risking failure. And hanging out with him and seeing him like that - he's my dad's age, born in the same month - when you find someone who's been through a really dark period, which most of his music I care about is from, Low, Lodger, \'Heroes\' era.... But he came out of it and made something that mattered.
I've become impossible, holding on to when everything seemed to matter more.
Being human is a lot more difficult than being on tour.
I'd never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work.
Sometimes I think I spend my whole life trying to figure out where I fit in.
I was up above it. Now, I'm down in it.
I've got a canvas, I've got a scene, let's fill that with sound.
Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.
Perfect little dream, The kind that hurts the most.
There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved.
The result of a public that has a very high consumption rate and turnover rate is people listen to more music but spend less time with individual bits of music. It's made me more likely to put things up quickly and treat it more like a magazine instead of a novel.
I think the whole aspect of social networking is vulgar and repulsive in a lot of ways.
I'm just trying to figure out the right balance between making fans feel good and also maintaining some dignity for myself in the process.
When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.
If I come up with rules or limitations it focuses me in a direction. And those rules can change if you realize it's a dumb idea. You start to mutate it to see what fits best.
Try to find the right balance of keeping things exciting and treating your audience with respect, and also treating yourself as an artist with respect.
My experience with being on a record label over the years has been when both of your agendas are in sync, and they're the same goal, it's great to have another army of people and resources and money. But most of the time, they're not the same. Their agenda is just simply to sell plastic discs at any cost, and yours is to preserve - at least in my case - your integrity, and hopefully sell some plastic discs, too.
One of my biggest heroes and people I was fortunate enough to be around is David Bowie. I look at his career, and he always had the balls to break things that weren't broken, to step away from something and try something new, at risk of failing.
If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.
Tired faith all worn and thin, for all we could have done, and all that could have been.
I thought Big Sur would be a great break after the tour. You'd walk down this rickety ladder to this not-very-pretty beach scene; crashing waves, moss-covered rocks, weird ocean life. It was scary. It summed up alot of things in my life, like 'I should be enjoying this, but I'm not.