Working with film directors helps me grow, but nothing like the incremental jumps I make onstage.
Just make videos about things you love, and people who love the things you love making videos about will find you.
I miss the videos that are short films, back when MTV played videos all day.
I will say that, I, being a Jew, experience unease before I go onstage; and after I go onstage, and in general. But luckily the forty-five minutes to an hour that I'm onstage I usually forget everything else and I just press play.
My wife is English and grew up eating Dairy Milk and Flakes and Twirls, so while she loves dark chocolate, she also has a soft spot for the milkier stuff.
I don't know if I have a favorite part of being an artist. I do love being onstage and performing with my band. I also love rehearsing with them and creating the show, that's always a fun part. But there's also nothing like being in the studio and being able to get back to myself and get back to my feelings.
My friend Phil Morrison directed a lot of my favorite videos back in the mid- to late-90s - all the Yo La Tengo videos that were funny, a Juliana Hatfield video. He was such an influence with me, and I wanted to do a video the way Phil used to do videos. I did that for Phil.
Not only are we not using any programmed loops or computers onstage, we're also improvising with our instruments. We're playing our instruments probably more so than most people that I see play their instruments. I think we all sort of strive for that - we all want magical things to happen onstage. We don't say "mistakes" in this band, we call them "highlights."
A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.
We pray before everything - videos, onstage, TV shows. I think that has a lot to do with being successful.
I didn't take a lot of the videos seriously; making videos was one of the most tedious things that you can imagine.
I sometimes like to do plyometric work which hits my core and the rest of my body at the same time: things like jumping to catch balls, box jumps, hurdling over cricket stumps, bounds, hops, or combined exercises like three jumps in a row followed by a sprint.
When we were first approached with the idea to do videos, we said why not. We used the things that we do in our lives in the videos.
It's hard for new directors to find good tracks because we don't usually get to choose good music by good artists. I honestly think music videos will slowly die out. There will always be a few directors who do cool things. But look how many great videos there were in the '90s, and then look at the 2000s. It's depressing.
One of the most positive takeaways I've had from 'SNL' is when we'd make videos back in the day: we'd just write material as we were inspired, and so, in a given year, we'd only put out two or three videos.
I have an elbow that bends the wrong way, and I'd do things like stand in an elevator and the doors would close, and I'd pretend that my arm had got caught in it, and then I'd scream, 'Ow, ow, put it back!'