I have kind of an existential crisis. I'm in my late 20s, I get excited by contemporary young culture, but at the same time, I don't want to be the 40-year-old DJ in the club.
There was a time in my late teens and early 20s where I was motivated by this wanting to get out, to prove to the world that I had something to offer - that kind of youthful spirit, where maybe I had my eye on fame and fortune. I mellowed out in my late 20s and now that I'm in my early 30s, I'm coming to peace with it.
I don't know any 21-year-old who's not having an existential crisis.
Professional motorcycle riders that are pretty young because it's a young man's sport. You're like out of your prime if you're in your mid to late 20s. Which is awful but a lot of guys still do ride into their late 20s. I rode. I just didn't do any of the jumps or races.
There's still this idea that women are over by the time they are 40, so that they can't play the love interest opposite a 50-year-old man. George Clooney is 52, but he's always on the arm of a thirt-something actress. He gets Vera Farmiga. You don't get a 50-year-old woman on the arm of a 30-year-old guy.
I always tell people that I have never ever gone dancing in my life. But that's the point. It's the point of dreaming of doing it, imagining doing it. My music is like a fantasy version of it, not a practical version of it. With the way a club DJ would make a track - they are in the club, they know how to get people excited. I don't know how to get people excited. I'm just imagining euphoria; I'm not necessarily feeling it.
My body is full of graves. A sepulcher is dug up, and a young girl comes out of it with her dusty hands in tears. A lady who is a young girl and an old girl at the same time feels the presence of the young girl. I feel that the 15-year-old me and the 50-year-old me come out of the sepulcher through an illegal excavation.
Sometimes you believe that you are targeting a 25-35-year-old young woman and you see that there is a crowd of 78-year-old people who are coming to buy some underwear, so it's not exactly the same kind of underwear that you have to sell.
I don't want to be classified as an old-skool DJ or new-skool DJ. I want to be classified as an all-skool DJ who plays it all. I also want to learn to DJ house music in my own fashion.
With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.
I'm a 40-year-old, and I have a 5-year-old kid. I don't want to be unhealthy. I want to be around for as long as I can.
In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.
What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real.
You want to be excited about what you're doing. So whenever I get tired, I think, 'Would ten-year-old Adam be pretty stoked on what I'm doing and what's happening?' So I just live my life as if I'm using my ten-year-old brain.
Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.
For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.
When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.