A Quote by John Densmore
Echo & the Bunnymen just copied 'People Are Strange,' which is cool, we made some money, thanks. But when an artist finds a new interpretation of one of your songs, that's great. It turns your head around.
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That's what is so great about being able to record a 13-song album. You can do a very eclectic group of songs. You do have some almost pop songs in there, but you do have your traditional country, story songs. You have your ballads, your happy songs, your sad songs, your love songs, and your feisty songs.
I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
I've had a relatively charmed life. I loved to be out in the city. New York was my town. I've had people come up to me and say, 'You're a great New Yorker. You've given your time and money to so many New York charities. You're a great supporter of the arts. I like some of your movies - and some of your movies suck, actually.'
I love New York, and I'm drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I've just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.
I think if you sing a song for the first time to your mom and dad, or your friends, and they go, 'That's pretty cool'-if you're playing at the local bar somewhere, or the coffee shop, singing songs, or if you have a gig somewhere and you're singing your own songs, I think that's some version of making it. ... It's not just about having commercial success; it's about having a great life.
Great people in the United States have been disenfranchised.I'll give you an example, it has always been the way to do it, to work hard, save your money, put your money in the bank, get interest on your money and retire wealthy, at least modestly wealthy. Well, the people that have done that have been hurt terribly because there is no interest on your money. You get no money. I just signed for some CDs where you are getting a quarter of one percent. A quarter of one percent! They don't even want your money, the banks.
Going to the office of some stranger and waiting in a line, in a hallway, with five other guys who look just like you, waiting your turn to go in and embarrass yourself, and then waiting around for feedback, which never comes. I really like that. For a young artist, it seems like the perfect thing to be doing, humiliation, over and over and over and over. Which I'm sure can't be the way that some people look at it, but I thought that was so great. The point of it is if you make your own stuff you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit.
I think the hardest person to love is yourself
I mean-
You carry your flaws like burdens
And you feel them on your skin
The words you shouldn't have said
Still echo in your head
So you keep quiet
Your mistakes, like monsters
They haunt you
And you put them to sleep every night
The words you should've said
Still echo in your head
I bet you'd give yourself a chance
If you were someone else instead
There are certain songs that are sacred. People want to hear them just as they are in their head; they don't want you messing around with them. And then there are some other songs, if they've been around a long time in our set list, that I think we can take some creative liberties with.
You can put a new shirt on your back, slide a fresh chain around your neck, and accumulate all the money and power in the world, but at the end of the day those are just layers. Money and power don't change you, they just further expose your true self.
With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.
I think now it's the money who tells the artist what to do - it's not the artist who tells the money what to do. And things move very fast, which is hard, because sometimes you need more time to be creative. I guess no one has a loud mouth like I did. They don't dare to scream loudly what they think. But you can't take fashion too seriously. The whole thing is about giving the woman who wears your clothes some power, some fun, some service. It's great to make it as art. But first, it's a service for someone.
Being a recording artist and having thousands of people listening to your music and singing your songs, and paying for it? It feels great!
Most people think in order to validate yourself as an artist, you have to write your own songs. I commend the guys that do. I've done it. But I also think that you can pick great songs outside that you didn't write that can help your career.
I think there's thousands of good songs in the world - the songs that we can all sing along to, songs that are just so catchy they end up being in your head. But I think a great song is something that emotionally engages with you and connects with you.
I've seen people who like a certain song write on their Instagram what they think the lyrics are - which they aren't. I'm like, 'Oh, that's interesting - you can create your own adventure with some of these songs.' Which is really cool.
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