The only new technology that interests me is when it sort of throws me back soundwise. And I can think, "Wow, that means I can go onstage and sound like Scotty Moore now and again!"
Every time I go to Veracruz, I feel like, OK, I am back. When my feet go to the ground on the earth, I think, 'This is me, this is home, these are my roots, and now I can go and travel again to wherever you want me to go.'
I started as a straight actor. I'd go onstage, and I'd think, 'Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene; I don't care - I'll do it again.'
Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still is now... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that.
When I first started comedy, before I kind of gained any national prominence, I - in a weird way - went back to that. Marc Maron had me on WTF making fun of me about that when I first opened for him. I had this very kind of hip-hop bravado to me, and I realized that now I've let some of that go in my stage presence, that maybe that was because I had dropped that completely from my life, and when I got onstage I sort of rekindled it. And I think now that it was perhaps a defense mechanism that was left over from those days, which I think is kind of interesting.
The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.
I think what's cool about Slayer is no matter how old their albums are, it's the one band to me that their sound is immortal. It never sounds corny to me. You can go back and listen to some Pantera and Metallica albums, and you're like, 'OK, great music.' But Slayer, you go back, and they always sound fresh and hard as hell.
In comedy you feel you need to go back to the theatre every now and again, you feel you need to go back to an audience every now and again to see if you're still getting your craft right, making people laugh at the moments you think they should and that sort of thing.
As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.
When I chose to do 'Carrie,' I never had done anything on camera before. I was always onstage, so everything surprised me. Just going on set and walking into a makeup trailer and seeing Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore - 'Wow, I am part of this ensemble.'
The only way you can get Scotty Moore's tone is with a big hollowbody guitar.
It was Scotty Moore's guitar riff [in "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You"] when he was doing The Steve Allen Show that got me into rock music.
Now, I'm a mixer. I can't help it. It's my nature. I like men. I like the taste of their boots, the smell of their legs, and the sound of their voices. It may be weak of me, but a man has only to speak to me, and a sort of thrill goes down my spine and sets my tail wagging.
What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers... synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records... The roots of rock'n'roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.
I think it's nearly impossible to be original now. For anything revolutionary to happen again, new instruments have to be invented. A new kind of guitar, maybe, and a new way to play it. There are only so many ways to manipulate sound, if you look at it scientifically.
With a song, it only takes a couple of minutes to go back to the beginning and try it again to see if it works. The novel freaks me out because, what if you get into the eighth chapter and think, 'Let's go to the top and see if this works again? It's going to take me three weeks.' I'm in awe of that.
I think it goes back to me being a recording mixer and engineer. Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound.