It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.
I've been around the music business for a long time now, and I've had a lot of chances to do movies. But I didn't really want to do any until I found stuff that started to hit me in the right place.
I had moved across the country, taken internships, networked, worked long hours, and called in favors to get there. And I had done it. I was working in Hollywood. So imagine the melancholy I found myself in when I realized that I didn't love casting the way that I always thought I would.
The first song I wrote and had published was titled "Just As Long As That Someone Is You". It was written in 1959, and recorded in 1965 by Jimmy Ellege. I started writing songs because I wanted something of my own to sing. I, at that time, was not aware that the songs I heard on the radio were not written by the folks singing them. I had always loved poetry, and found it easy to integrate a melody with poetry.
When I played my own songs, I had to do everything myself to get it the right way, but now I think it's interesting to see how it becomes music.
I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.
I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I've also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you've squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.
Here's the way Static-X has always worked: I write all the songs by myself - totally and completely by myself - I give demos to the other guys, and then they add their parts to it, and then we argue about stuff and compromise and it turns out being Static-X.
I've always thought that as long as I did the right things and had the right intentions, everything would fall into place.
I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.
When I first started writing these kind of songs that would eventually become Decemberists songs, I was writing them because I knew that nobody was listening at the time and that it wouldn't hurt to challenge myself and get weirder and see if I could alienate more people
I started writing songs in high school and always wanted to have a band, and eventually my creative endeavors developed into Theocracy. So in some ways, you could say the vision has been there since I started writing songs.
I think City are probably four or five years ahead of us, they've had a manager for such a long time, worked a certain way for such a long time. Going forward, my idea and I'm sure everyone's idea of Tottenham is to be brave and try and dominate games like they do.
I don't seem to have time to breathe. Everything's happening so quickly, and so much is happening all the time.
We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.
If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.
I always thought that I was a terrible writer. And I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role because, of course, it's really not me.