Top 123 Quotes & Sayings by Mike McCready - Page 2

Actors want to be musicians, and musicians want to be baseball players.

We'll go to South America and play to 60,000. It's insane.

I think I bought into that whole rock n' roll lifestyle, and all that does in the end is kill ya. So I don't recommend it to anyone.

Playing albums in sequence can be awesome, or it can be very limiting.

We came out of a very provincial city that was not very supportive of music, and we had to do our own thing and flyer everywhere.

I'd love to have Jack White up. I think he's just a phenomenal guitar player. I'd love to see him play up close because he's got a killer voice, and he's a great lead player, too. That would be exciting to me.

Pearl Jam sit down and have conversations about Kiss all the time on tour.

I hope we've lightened up over the years. We're fairly comfortable where we are, living-wise, and we're excited, honestly, just to still be around. I think we're less earnest than we were.

I used to sit for hours and copy every lick on those early AC/DC and Kiss records. From there, I went on to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. After a while, you kind of develop your own style.

Everything I know, I stole directly from Ace Frehley, Angus Young, and Keith Richards. That's how you learn.

Jeff Ament, the bass player, plays basketball. He ultimately wants to do music, but he's really good at basketball, too. We all want to do what we can't do, maybe.

We want to push boundaries musically if we can and come at things from a different direction.

I like to have a lot of different creative outlets.

I think, as an artist, you want to keep going - you want to keep taking challenges; you want to be pushed, in a way - and I think Sonic Evolution does that, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable and get out of my comfort zone.

Honestly, I'd rather do regular interviews. It's more interesting to talk about whatever... anything other than guitars. I'm not into being a tech-head.

I think our fans are bigger and better students of Pearl Jam than we are.

We want to have a life outside of Pearl Jam, too.

That's a fantasy of mine. We could do every record in a residency. It would be so cool. We could play the B-sides along with the album and get really creative with it.

I wanted to start doing more music, doing more things than just playing guitar. I started taking singing lessons and piano lessons. I need to learn more things, to be an artist or whatever, and then transfer that back into writing songs.

When we did our first record, my mindset was this is all going to be over tomorrow.

There's a Kiss through-line to a lot of the music that came out of Seattle, and it hasn't been talked about a lot.

Whether it's Neil Young or Johnny Rotten, a band has to have someone like that: someone who you listen to and know that he believes what he says.

Soundgarden are kind of the masters of writing songs that aren't pop cliches.

We were accused of sounding like a couple of bands when we started out. Aerosmith was one.

Reason why we've lasted so long is we write music; we get very intense. We go away from each other, do our own thing, and then we get back together.

As a band, we just don't tolerate any kind of abuse or intolerance of any kind of LGBT people by any kind of government.

Am I really an author if I just put pictures in a book?

We have a ridiculous amount of material.

I never play as well without these guys; the best I have ever been creatively has been with Pearl Jam.

When we're not doing any Pearl Jam stuff, that's when I'll probably think of doing something else, whether that be scoring - hopefully more opportunities will come - or doing a solo thing.

A lot of times, bands will go on tour, and people only wanna hear the hits. Luckily, our fans are receptive to our new stuff.

We can go to Australia and play to 30-to-40,000. We can do that in certain places in the States, but not everywhere.

I hold Mad Season very fondly to my heart, and there's a lot of sadness in that, too.

When you're in a band, you're just trying to do whatever you can to keep your band together. You're thinking very inwardly, very myopic.

We value doing things grassroots, even at this level. That means no real high ticket prices or meet-and-greets and all that kind of stuff.

A song kind of comes out of anywhere. A song will come out of the sky, or an idea, or walking around, or playing with other guys.

It's always cool when somebody from a football team or baseball team comes to your show.

Chris Cornell painted in song the darkness and beauty of life in Seattle.

When they're singing the guitar lines of songs in South America? Never heard that before. And in Canada, when they're singing all of the lyrics to every song - that blows me away. I don't know all the lyrics to every song.

I love some kind of pressure in the air. Some kind of weirdness in the crowd, good or bad. That's what we thrive on.

I still believe guitars will be around as long as there's rock music.

'Even Flow' is the best to play live because of the long solos. It starts out slow and builds, and, depending on what the audience does, I can reflect that in the solo.

I don't know if you could call me a natural-born runner.

People will steal ideas and put them into songs.

I think about trying to make it better. That's all I do when we play 'Even Flow' or anything off of 'Ten': 'Let's do this the best we can.'

There's times when I go, 'We should have done a bunch of videos.'...Regardless of mistakes we've made, we made 'em, and we own 'em.

In the early days of Pearl Jam, we were caught up in such a whirlwind that I was just trying to keep my head on straight and play music. I didn't have the kind of confidence that other guys in the band did.

I love surprising the fans.

I really liked Stevie Ray Vaughn, so hey - I tried to look like him.

Playing music was something I wanted to do since I was 11 years old, so when we went on tour and started selling records, it was an incredible, strange dream.

Recording 'Ten,' we probably did 'Even Flow' 30 times.

I like 'X-Files'-type shows with government conspiracies and extraterrestrials and all that.

'Black Diamond' blew my mind. Ace Frehley came onstage and did it with us at Madison Square Garden a few years ago, which was a total high watermark in my life. When I was 13, I never thought in a million years that I would even talk to him; I'd probably pass out. And here I am playing with him!

Mad Season changed my life in a million different ways.

I remember, after the New Year's Eve 1991 show, somebody running onto the bus and saying Nirvana had just hit No. 1. I remember thinking, 'Wow; it's on now.' It changed something. We had something to prove - that our band was as good as I thought it was.

I've always had this term 'mad season' in my head.

I don't ever want to play a festival again, period.

Duff McKagen's been a dear friend of mind for a long time, and he's a Seattlelite.

We're always working on our communication, which is something that's important. Instead of going through managers to discuss things, we will sit down and have meetings about things. That's a process. And you have to be able to be honest with each other as much as you can.

There are moments in South America, in Brazil, where you look out, and there are literally thirty, forty thousand people jumping up and down at the same time.