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| ”The studio (at Bearsville) has this really gigantic room. It is more like a barn, really. It’s a very woodsy kind of feeling. The whole band was all in one room and most of the basic tracks that we cut for the record were all of the band together. There’s a little bit more emotion, a little bit more of that live energy captured in this record.” ”There’s always been the want to collaborate on some things. You really can’t force it, though. It just happens when it happens. This (“Feel” and “Soul”) was not a preconceived thing; it was one of the beautiful things that happens when you get five minds in a room. Sometimes it's bad, and sometimes it’s good.” “It’s still very much about songs. It’s about sticking to a great song and melody, and having a melody that's very singable; something you can take with you. I don’t know what to equate it toÑa British sound, I guess. It’s kind of Coldplay-ish with elements of Radiohead.” (about his band, The New Left) "I started playing guitar at about age 13, but I played violin about four or five years leading up to that. At that age you just realize you're in the geek camp. I love classical music and I always have, but there was nothing cool about playing violin when you're 13." "Everyone should come out and have a couple of beers with matchbox twenty." "[American] Hi-Fi is just kind of in that Good Charlotte, Green Day high-energy vibe. The whole set is a lot of guitars and a lot of jumping around." "Sugar Ray is just the shiniest, happy music in the world. No one can listen to it and not have a good time." "We play She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah. All I Need has almost got that mop-top jangle to it, like the early Beatles." "Jimi [Hendrix] has always been a huge influence." "Now I get to tell people I know Mick Jagger. That's probably the most important thing." "Rob has a pretty good Elvis impression. He used to have an Elvis guitar he played. It was one of these big-bodied custom guitars that had something about the King on it. I'll have to pass (the Tupelo connection) on to him because maybe we'll pull out 'Suspicious Minds' or something." "He greeted us at the door. He was really polite and É short. You expect Mick Jagger to be like Shaquille O'Neal or something. He was really involved. I didn't expect him to be there. It was kind of like meeting the wizard. You think little elves are going to run around and take care of all the magical things, but he was right there at the sound board, singing ideas and working." "Everybody's been giving me the 'tsk-tsk' thing. You know, 'Told ya so. We're going to have to cancel the show because of your stupid ball.' It's all in the look, too, they don't even have to say it." (when he injured his finger playing basketball) "There's been a lot of bad luck on this tour. But we surpass, and we rise like a phoenix from the ashes." "Sometimes, when you record a record, you don't realize what you're up against until you actually have to perform it. In hindsight, some of those songs on 'Mad Season' were a bit too much. So with this record, it was like, 'All right, the kitchen sink isn't always needed.' It took some criticism for us to realize we really wanted to get back to something that sounded like something we could achieve with five people." "It's hard to make that work, because you're taking two independently manufactured ideas and trying to make one, and a lot of times, it just sounds like that. It would be like one person writing a sentence and someone else writing a completely different sentence and trying to make a coherent phrase out of it." "It just so happened that with 'Soul,' I had a little motif that I'd been playing for a long time, and Rob and Paul had this chorus. Rob already had this thing they wanted to tag with the word 'soul,' so they worked on it and worked on it, and it happened to work. We just got lucky . . . but it adds another chapter to the band, because it gave us a lot of confidence. We realized, 'Wow, it can be done.' " "I get a call from management saying, 'Mick's going to send you a car, he'd like you to come down and play on the record.' What do you say? 'I've got better things to do?' It was a great experience. I expected him to not even be there, but he was very involved, very hands-on." "If guess it could be viewed as a bad thing when you step away from something people love and get involved with other projects, but you learn a lot from other musicians by doing that, and it's valuable to take back to the home base of Matchbox." "I've got to give some props to those guys, man. Anybody who's around should check them out when they play a show. I'm surprised they don't have a record deal yet." (talking about The Chase Theory) "My wife just came over and took a big sip from my glass of ice. I'm like, 'Honey, I've been dousing my finger in that thing.' " "Velvet! But she can't be a stripper!" (his suggestion to a fan for a baby name, LOL) "We wanted to eliminate a little bit of this kind of sheen that was there on “Mad Season. It feels a little more like a record made in the 70s, because there wasn’t nearly as much studio/computer trickery going on." (about MTYTYA) |