Every time I'm home from tour I try to write some new songs, but it can get really hard trying to keep up with normal life, I always get so behind.
Most of the time, we write something and then figure out who would be best to do it.
You start to think, when you're finishing a record, in twelve- to fourteen-minute chunks. At a certain point, you do write to the format. It's not a coincidence that most albums are between thirty-five and fifty minutes. It's kind of like the 98-minute film. It becomes some paradigm for human attention in the media.
I've got Ph.D. just because I enjoyed reading and writing and didn't know what else to do. It was something fun to do. Like it seems self-evident that I'm a musician now, but it's a really hard path. It's almost impossible.
Once you have MIDI information - I mean, it's a bit technical - that's your paint. You can slow down, pitch up, change notes within a different key. That's the foundation in which you can write things.
I found all my reading and writing informed my music in subtle ways. Ravedeath came out of studying the pipe organ, going to New Jersey - the world's loudest and biggest pipe organ.
There's a limit of any form of representation; it's the same about writing about visual art. I still think it's useful for people to think through things in a deeper way, and use adjectives even if they're not sufficient, you know? I always find it interesting what terms they use to refer to the work. It's always different, and that's kind of intriguing. Sometimes it's clichés, but often it's really creative ways of paraphrasing or reformatting what to mean seems something else. I like that, personally.
I really support criticism as a craft and as a vocation. People who devote as much time to thinking about sound through writing as I do practicing and forming it, the whole system of journalism seems to not yield rewards sustainable as a craft. So few can spend enough time to be serious about it and approach it with confidence and a kind of depth. And that's good on one level, because you have some leveling, that's kind of maybe leveled the petty fiefdoms of undeserving people but it's also made it hard to make a living as a writer.
I take the literary or textual aspect really seriously and I really enjoy writing weird album titles. I did a PhD; I enjoy writing.
I'm trying to find a way to make music work as a living. People used to make their living selling albums. Those days are over! It's kind of an odd time. I guess it's kind of like writing.
If you want to write an angry e-mail, write it but don't send it. It's based on my experience that whenever I have acted out in some manner, I have always regretted it.
I think that most people who write about music just want to fill some paper. They're not really interested in getting to the heart of something. Otherwise, they wouldn't write what they write.
Why can't you write a great pop song when you are 85? Maybe you can.
Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.
The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks...Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.
We live in such a hyperliterate world, soaked and saturated in writing: on our machines, on the streets, on our television screens. It's just that writing doesn't live in the boxes that it used to. The genie is out of the bottle. But that just means that the magic could be anywhere.
I'm bullish on writing. Movies, radio, television, and now digital media - everything was supposed to push us away from text, to video or "back" to speech. First, there's no going back. We're always stumbling forward. Second, writing is invincible. Thirty years ago, we thought we'd all be talking to our computers; instead, we're all typing on our phones.
If you look around at the news industry, there are more and more sites clamoring for that kind of writing, whether it's an Ideas section or personal essay series or longform. Readers are hungry for it. It's like prestige TV, though; it's execution-dependent. You have to figure out the right advertiser or sponsor, and you have to deliver, you can't just feed the beast.
It occurred to me that for a long time I tried not to write about my own backyard and my home. I suppose I was selfishly keeping it to my self. And in doing so, I was never able to get out into this incredible wilderness area - by the way, I live right at the edge of the most incredible wilderness area probably in the northern hemisphere.
As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.
It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
Editors, for the most part, don't care ''what'' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they.
The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
