A Quote by Ville Valo

We started playing music from an early age and so we wasn't really aware of that side of it, the weird thing is the more successful you get the more free booze and drugs you get, they should be given to the bands who don't have the money.
When we started playing our music, there weren't really many bigger punk bands. We wrote for ourselves. We weren't expecting to get a record deal or get on the radio.
I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.
I hope we can keep doing it this way - making music and art that are pure products of our influences while not really having to let the whole celebrity side of it get in the way. Then maybe more virtual bands will come out and do the same thing.
I get a chance to see new bands and new music. I've seen a lot of amazing local bands, bands that I think 'have what it takes', that they could become the next big thing. More often than not it doesn't happen.
Food is one of life's really great pleasures. My 20th birthday party was all about booze, my 30th birthday was about drugs, and now I realise that my 40s are about food. It's something you appreciate more and more as you get older.
When I first started, I wasn't really aware of anything in the industry or aware of who I really was. I just put my music out there and tried to get as many people to hear it as possible. I hadn't really thought about the kind of music I wanted to make.
Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.
When I was growing up, I wasn't in bands, and had really no intention of ever doing music. I went out to California for college, and kind of on a whim started making music really as a joke, and over the course of the next five years started playing a lot of shows, and music became this really integral part of my identity.
When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing.
Those late '60s early '70s bands would take it really far out and get super-weird.
I hated it so much as a child. I just didn't like it when punk bands went metal, it really bothered me. It was happening left and right in the 1980s. It started I think with D.C. bands - G.I., Soul Side, they went metal. Right at that time, R.E.M. was coming out, these more kinda feminine bands, and I was more drawn to that than to go metal. And you remember MTV, with the bad metal. But even Metallica, it just wasn't my direction.
The sooner you get something started the more likely you get to be successful, get started today!
I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief.
When I first started, I wasn't really aware of anything in the industry or aware of who I really was. I just put my music out there and tried to get as many people to hear it as possible.
If people are talking about you, that's great. You start making more money, that's great. You get to go to weird places, that's great. The music industry is weird, especially with the Internet. People are calling you all kinds of weird stuff, like 'jangly.'
I think it's become much harder because I'm more afraid of every step I take. I'm more aware of its ramifications, I'm more aware of the less creative aspects of music - like the business-side of things for example.
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