"It's one thing to play a certain type of music, but it? another thing to have no originality."
"Art is only art when you're truly happy with it. Especially with what we went through to do this record."
"It's weird- I don't really understand it. We get girls coming up crying; we get presents on a daily basis from people. They'll know about stuff that we just got into a week ago...It makes no sense to me.
"I used to sit at home on the internet and read the most horrible nasty things about me and everyone else in the band. But not anymore; I had to stop looking at that shit."
"We didn't do it tonight, because we did this interview, but after every show, we usually stand on the roof of the venue, paint a big pentagram and wait for the UFOs."
"Finding out I was adopted was really hard for me."
"I played guitar ever since I was 9, but I didn't really get into it until I was 12. I was just self-taught and wrote my own songs all the time."
"I don't believe in growing up too fast, as long as you're confortable with [how] your growing up."
"I don't drive, so I rely on my few companions to taxi my lame ass around LA. I don't go to clubs and parties; I like to go on adventures and explore unknown realms hoping to find a wormhole or a portal, or maybe just a sewer."
"[If I weren't in FFTL], I would probably be in theatre. My dad used to take me to plays when I was younger, and they blew my mind. I always had an artistic urge, and my first taste in live-energy art was theatre."
Thanks AP Magazine and Kerrang! Magazine
The following quotes are from the DJ Rossstar Interview.
"When I first moved to L.A., my first friends that I met were in chat rooms. I was so desperate because it was the beginning of summertime and I had no friends. I went to an L.A. chat room and got their phone numbers. We started to talk on the phone and we ended up meeting at shows and stuff."
"I love that song 'Goodbye' by Spice Girls. It's actually one of the best choruses ever written."
"I have inspiration A.D.D. It changes every five seconds."
"I don't really think much is awkward."
"I want to make music. Everything else is secondary and inferior to the fact that I want to make music, and whatever happens will happen."
"Ideally, I would like to tour with younger bands, like Endless Hallway, they're a really cool band. I like the idea of touring with younger bands that may have a similar thing that I'm doing, as far as my intentions go."
"The internet is the communication hub for the world."
"It was always my decision at a younger age that I never wanted to go through my teen life as a normal teenager, and finish high school, and go to proms and stuff. It felt natural to me. It's not so much about being in the music 'bizz'. It's more about doing music and knowing that your lifetime is such a small thing and to waste it doing anything else you don't like is just shooting yourself in the foot."
"Me and Aaron live in downtown Los Angeles in a loft with 13, 15 ft ceilings. We have this one big room, sort of like a second story that we built. There are four other guys that live with us and we just make music all day and hang out."
"I don't go to bars much to be honest, but I'm only twenty so..."
"I don't really get out much."
"Flim from Aphex Twin is my favourite song."
"I've been writing songs ever since I can remember. As I was in fetal position, I was etching songs into my mom's placenta."
"I feel inspired by younger artists."
"San Fransisco was great. L.A. is great. I traveled a lot throughout my life. Los Angeles is my home, but at the same time, everywhere else sort of feels like my home."
"I had broken my nose a couple of years ago. I got kicked in the nose only an hour before the FFTL set, and my nose actually snapped all the way to the left side. What happened was, I broke it back myself, and it gave me a really bad deviated septum, which means the wall that divides my nostrils was completely caved in and fucked up. So then after that, the bone grew back so incorrectly, it took away 90% of my nasal passage, basically. My ENT (ear, nose, and throat doctor), also known as an otolaryngologist had been telling me that it'd be detrimental to my voice and my career, and that I had to get my nose fixed back so I can breathe again."
"If I wanted a Michael Jackson nose why would it fucking matter?"
"Just don't be afraid to be yourself and write whatever comes out."
"I think karma's very important."
"'Mora' is a very small piece of time. 'In Mora' is less than a second. It's such a small glimpse of time."
"I don't like the word 'fetish'."
"My first real concert experience was Metallica in 1998."
Sonny explaining the meaning of the song "Shame Shame."
"I wrote this song about giving in to doing things that you know aren't
right, and feeling hatred and disgust towards yourself afterwards. To me, when
this happens, it feels like I -- as a spiritual being -- vanished, and my body
took over on a rampage, sucking the life out of everything. In those moments,
I've felt blind and senseless, and any deep thoughts, emotions or even attempts
to create art were nullified. There was a period in my life where everyone
looked like soulless bodies in a state of confussion, just looking to reproduce
& die. I'd get tangled up in that state, and the next morning, I would feel
extreme amounts of shame." - Sonny Moore [AP Mag]
The following quotes are from the AP podcast
"On this tour, I think it was between Portland, Oregon and Utah, or something like that? I think we had to go through this pass, and we were in a van, and we didn't have chains, and actually spun out and almost went off the side of the road. Our van started going sideways and then we blew a tire out in this blizzard. We all had to go outside and change the tire, and none of us could sit in the van 'cause we had the jack. It took a long time because the jack wasn't big enough, so we had to run to the woods and find rocks and logs, and finally after like an hour and a half we flagged down a cop and he came up and he had a bigger jack and we did it. That was pretty crazy. That was scary. I've been in a lot of snowy drives and that was probably the scariest time."
"Actually before this tour, the first tour that I did was like a two-week run with Team Sleep, which is Chino from the Deftones. He's been one of my heroes for a long time, musically, and it was cool because he actually handpicked all bands on the tour. It was Strata and another band called Monster in the Machine. Just a couple of weeks before the tour he invited me over to his house and we just hung out and went out to eat and stuff. That was kind of a cool experience, being able to like?'ve talked to a lot of my peers and some of the people that I've looked up to, but it was the first time that I really got to actually ask somebody about them as an artist, like, "What's this song," and we actually had really cool conversations about digging into who he is as Chino and his expressions in his songs and all his lyrics. I kinda got?lmost, like, not interviewing, but I really got to ask every question that I've always wondered, but it was really cool. There was no real barrier between us. It wasn't like "Chino and the fan: Sonny." It was like me having a conversation with a friend. It was really nice to do that."
"I never really get star-struck."
"Last night actually, um, where were we last night? Pittsburgh? Last night I went down the street and ate at this little diner, Joes. It was delicious; I had the chicken salad. I walked in and on the left there was a woman sitting down and she was like, "You're Sonny, right?" I'm like, "Yeah." She's like "Yeah, I saw you a couple years ago with Fall Out Boy, it's good to see you touring,' and blah blah blah. We had a quick conversation and she's like, "Yeah, my daughter's at the show." I sat down, I ordered up, and then I got my wallet out to pay after I ate, and then the waiter was like, "No, she took care of it for you." I sat down and we had a long conversation. I was like, "Thank you so much. That? so awesome." So, I mean, most of the moms I've met have actually been really cool, but there's always those one or two kind of really demanding crazy moms?ell, not crazy, but you know?
"I think when we start writing songs the last thing we think about is, "Oh I wonder how many people aren't gonna kill themselves because of this song."
"Of course these are our careers. We're not doing this for complete personal reasons or else we'd just be in our room, doing day jobs and playing music for ourselves, you know? We like to play in front of people, but at the same time, where it comes from, it is personal. Maybe I'm speaking for myself too much but you don't really think about that. And all of a sudden when someone comes up to you and expresses that, you're like, wow, that's crazy. I mean, at the same time, I think music is one of the most genuinely personal artistic forms there are because it is the most personal. All art is up for interpretation, but I feel that a voice and a melody is so personal to people, and a lyric will never mean the same thing it does to me to somebody else, but it's crazy, yeah. I can totally relate with that 'cause I've had people come up to me and say the same thing. All I can think about is, wow, that wasn? my intention, not to say that it? not a great thing."
"A performance to me is not when you?e trying to perform, it's when you are most interested and involved in that. There's one thing, you can run around stage in a contortive way saying, "Look at me! Look at me!" or you can be an artist or fall into what you were talking about, and that naturally becomes a performance. To me, these are the best performances; when you're looking at somebody create art and not just play the notes or sing notes or sing lyrics. Those moments?ou don't think about anybody else in the room when that happens. It's just you. Sometimes it may take a song or two to get into, but there are definitely these moments, and those are the key moments in a performance; when you're singing every lyric and going back to the place where you wrote those lyrics or wherever it came from. You're actually feeling that, and that becomes a natural performance."
"It's a song by Aphex Twin, A.K.A. Richard D. James, and it is the second song off the ?ome to Daddy EP. It is called 'Flim'. There are no lyrics to the song, but it is my favourite song of all time, actually I've said this before. It's hard to explain but I think ultimately what any art does, any art form, whether it's music, painting, an actor, performance, art, music, painting?lah blee dee de, I said the same thing three times? think it's supposed to provoke an emotion, that is aesthetic emotion. There are different types of songs for different reasons; you listen to metal and it? heavy and driving. You listen to Sigur R? and you kind of fall asleep, you know what I mean? There's different purposes. This song for some reason provokes the strongest. I can ready poetry and feel something, but I've never felt something more than when I listen to this song, just because of the melody. It is just melodically everything that I wish I could have produced almost, you know what I mean? I don't know how to explain, but it? the most beautiful song to me and it goes through every emotion; every sad and happy emotion through this one song so perfectly to me. And it's short; it's only two and a half minutes long, and it's like, gosh, I want to die to that song."
"I've never done anything like this before. Isn't that funny? I've never done radio before. Actually, that's not true. I did one radio interview but it wasn't, like?'ve done a couple at like festivals where they have the radio booths set up and a microphone. I've never done a proper?ound engineer, microphones, people, questions? suck at questions. I suck at answering them."
"A lot of bands that are older people that still have careers, they've been doing it for a long time as well. Bands like Radio Head, Nine Inch Nails or Smashing Pumpkins, they at one point were young and spoke to the youth. They have kept their fan base, and I think that youth culture happens to be a rebellious thing. Like, when you're a teenager you're rebellious at some point. You see all the kids coming out to the concerts and I think they can relate to us more than someone that may seem older. I just think that if a kid has something in common with an artist, then it makes it last longer, whereas if its something like, "Oh, I like the song, but the dude is just kind of? If they actually feel like they can connect with the artist outside of the music as well. Just from who they are, or seem to be, you know?"
"I'll go back to school and work a day job and make more money, and I'd be unhappy, you know what I mean? Or, I can say, fuck it man. I live this lifetime once and I'm going to do music and if I starve I'm still fucking doing music 'cause I love it so much. Even if it's not music that a million people are gonna connect with. I love to play music and it's the only thing that makes me feel confident. I'm the most confident one. I'm excelling in my music and that's the most important thing to me."
"I think the real chance would have been if I were to stay in that band [From First To Last] how long would I have kept my sanity? No offence to the guys. I love the dudes and I'll always love the guys unconditionally. It wasn't even about them, it was about me. It's not a thing of what they were doing to me; it's not a pity party, but the chance was am I going to record this major label record and become something I don't want to be? That was the chance, and the easy thing to do was to go, "No. Let's not take a chance. Let's do what I want to do." The fact that I got to taste a little bit of that success-- it wasn? like I was gonna miss anything. I didn't miss anything that I had. I'm still the same person. I've grown a lot, everybody grows everyday, but it was just the most necessary thing I had to do for me. I wasn't thinking about anybody but myself and I feel like in that sort of situation you gotta think for yourself. You gotta do what? right for you completely, even if you're gonna put someone out in the rain for whatever reason. I've dropped off tours 'cause I've blown out voices. I've in a lot of ways crippled that bands career for a little bit because I left. I'm the singer of a band that just signed this big fucking contract or whatever, which means shit to me. Again, what I said, this is not about making money. This is about playing music and because I have the opportunity, there's this world that's set up where you can be a musician and make money. But you always have to think about the music first or you're a whore. That's what I think, for me personally, and again, I can always make money. Anyone can always do anything and make money. You can do accounting, you can be a prostitute, you can do whatever. I love music so much it didn't matter to me. I was not doing the music that I loved. It wasn't a chance, it was the other way around."
"I actually didn't go to high school. I was?rom the age nine to ten I was in a boarding school out in the Mohave Desert in California. And then from the age?ell actually, I was born in L.A. and then I moved to San Francisco with my parents when I was two, and then I went to just normal schools out there, and then when I moved back I was twelve. I started going to this artsy kind of school, like a private school that focused on arts and stuff and then I stopped going when I was like, fourteen. I just went to this home school thing from the age fourteen to sixteen, and I never really kept up with academics at all. I was always just playing music, playing in bands, going out to shows, getting in trouble. I started touring when I was like sixteen. I've never been to a real public high school; that's such a foreign world and idea to me. I never went to prom or any of that stuff."
"I think I was fortunate to have a really awesome father. He would refer to me as a musician at a really young age, and he bought me my first guitar when I was nine. I started learning songs 'cause I was a guitar player before I was a singer, and I started learning songs. He would, like, brag about me at his work 'cause I used to play in local bands, and he would get photographers to come out and shoot for us and stuff. He was like, "Yeah. My son's a musician." It kinda stuck with me."
"Fuck it if I don? sell a million records. That's how I look at it. That's how I'm going into this. As far as money goes, I rely on the live show. I think that really shows a musician in his fullest potential, I think is in a live show, just because you can always sing a vocal a zillion times in a studio, but you only have one shot to do it live."
"I think it's crazy that Snoop Dogg is playing Bamboozle amongst all the other bands. That's kinda crazy. A lot of festivals and stuff are really supporting unity within genres and I think that's very important."
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