When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.
So you can have your program, but you also have to be ready to change it immediately because there are certain kinds of people who like certain kinds of songs and they like - some people want to dance when you come out, some people just want to be intimate with you. So you kind of feel your way through a show.
I didn't start really playing the guitar till I was about seventeen, and I never really had those formative years are where like I was in my room, figuring all that stuff out before I hit the stage. I just did all that on the road all at once, so all those years of playing roadhouses in bars and clubs, I was really figuring it out.
The world doesn’t need more people playing small. It’s time to stop hiding out and start stepping out. It’s time to stop needing and start leading. It’s time to start sharing your gifts instead of hoarding them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s time you started playing the game of life in a “big” way.
In '05, '06, '07 and '08, I wasn't throwing any changeups at all. Maybe two or three per game. In '09, I started playing with the grip, started throwing it in the bullpen and playing catch. It came out really good.
There's definitely some pieces in there that reflect on my personal life, but really, they aren't as personal as everybody thinks they are. I would like them to be more personal. The emotions, the songs themselves are personal. I can't do it - I've tried to write personally and it just doesn't seem to work. It would be too obvious. Some things that you could read in could fit into anyone's life that had any amount of pain at all. It's pretty cliche'.
After 'Rings,' I had two feelings: One, I immediately didn't want to work on anything on a large scale. I wanted to work on something really small after I was finished filming the first three. But the other thing was that I had a continuing interest in working on things that were really different.
I think doing more live stuff's made us feel a certain way about that particular point. I quite like small clubs. I don't really like playing in big clubs, and I think I'm really into the idea of a few people being together.
In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.
I used to go to the Church of the Harvest, right off Adams and La Brea. There was a pastor there who had the best big choir and the best band. He would start praying, and the music would start playing and just make people feel so good, you could break out of whatever you were going through. Soft music can have that effect, too.
I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.
I'm not going to play someone too far from who I am. Although I did a movie where I played a killer, and that has yet to come out. But that's someone I love being able to shock people with. I could do something you would not expect me to do. My limitations are - I'm not Meryl Streep. I'm not playing anything in a foreign language, or anything too far from who I am.
When I started, the music I would be drawn to would be heavy metal and new wave like Black Sabbath - things that seemed more shocking - and then, of course, eventually I would find bands and writers who were laying things out very clearly and whose words felt very sharp to the touch and sharp to your feelings.
I don't like anything that looks gelatinous - really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness.
I try to be positive, and from 'Individual'... which was an angry record. I got a lot of mail from people pouring out their feelings, saying that they could really relate to certain topics that I touched upon. When I read that, it lets know that there are people out there that are people out there who are going through the same things.
As much as we love playing the small clubs, we'd really like to get ourselves in front of a larger audience. I'm not talking about arenas or anything, but nice theaters and larger clubs.
I approached work very seriously. I never went out. I couldn't fathom people who could go out to clubs... I mean, if I had a 6 A.M. call, I had to be prepared. I had to be in bed at a certain hour.