A Quote by Joshua Ferris

Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.
The Photo Album is the weakest record. For the first time in our careers, we found ourselves with an economic incentive to be on the road and to be making albums. We had cut ourselves free from the security of day-job life. The goals became primarily financial, at least for a while. That was the roughest time we had ever had as a band, because that was the first moment we realized that this was for real. We were not goofing around anymore. We all threw everything we had into this in a way where we all found ourselves really far from home, and we were stuck with each other.
When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.
The story of our band is that we were this relentless touring band in those early years. We were leaving day jobs and going off on the road and having fun and seeing the country for the first time. We were playing Chinese restaurants and basements and record stores and houses. We were crashing on floors and it was all new and exciting. It was like a vacation. It didn't feel like work. I couldn't wait to go on tour back then. I would be sitting at my day job or my apartment, just itching to go. There were so many adventures that were about to happen.
We've been through the experience of being in high school and starting a band. Then we were also a garage band, while we were going to college, trying to make ends meet.
You have to prepare to quit, and this is what I did. I prepared to quit, so on the day that came when I had to walk away from the game, I walked away and didn't look back.
We kind of just got more mature and more realistic with what we're doing. We kinda said, "We quit our jobs and we quit college to do this, and we're going to be playing these songs every day just about, y'know, on a stage... so let's write songs that we're never gonna get sick of playing." Songs that aren't just gonna follow a trend of what's going on right now, y'know?
The only way the band could make any money was by going on tour. But going on tour meant we had to get time off from our jobs, and we couldn't get enough time off to make enough money from touring to survive, so the only way to try was to quit our jobs. None of us had a job that was so wonderful that we were just dying to keep it.
After I quit my band, I definitely was so full, like I'm so full I could never eat again. I had that kind of feeling where the elements, like the touring stuff, were harder for me and I definitely felt fine not experiencing it again.
I believe I've still got lots and lots to do. When I left Herman's Hermits in 1973, I said one day I'm gonna be in a Broadway show, and I thought it would be in 1974. Then, it took me ten years to do it, but I didn't ever quit.
I didn't finish high school. I tried to as an adult, but with all this touring, I had to quit.
We were kids that didn't have any education. None of our parents were in the music business or even college graduates. We didn't have someone guiding us. We were just uneducated kids from the middle of nowhere that suddenly had a band going around the world.
I cleaned up. I quit drinking, I quit doing drugs, I quit stealing, I quit breaking into houses, I tried to quit being a bad human being. I developed a conscience later in life than many. I call it the lost-time-regained dynamic.
I'm so thankful when I have a job. I would say the worst job I ever had was the one I quit after the first night. I was an overnight restaurant janitor. And it wasn't because of the job. We had to do four restaurants in the night, overnight. But I was working with a den of thieves. I just quit the next day.
Someone suggested the Kaiser Chiefs while we were looking for a band name. We had so many ideas ourselves, at least one of us had said no to every idea except Kaiser Chiefs.
We tracked 'Domestic Sweater' live as a full band. It had been a while since we had even performed so in doing so, a sweet innocence arose, as though we were playing in our garage again.
We found ourselves becoming more serious about playing music than our friends were - or just more committed and had more meaningful connections. I realized then that I would probably be playing in bands for the rest of my life; that that's what made me happy. Even though it's awesome that people are paying attention - buying records or selling shows out - I never have that conscious thought about, "this is going to be the band that will tour the world."
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