A rock'n'roll band needs to be able to get under people's skin. You should be able to clear the room at the drop of a hat.
Actually, I've done it the other way so many times where you rehearse the band and you do the whole thing with lights, the show and the crew - everything. Then you see what happens and you're already committed to dates. I'm just sort of putting out feelers this way.
Although, my experience when I've been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I'm too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you're halfway away from it.
Any musician who can stop may be a musician, but they're no artist. If it's in your blood, it can't stop flowing.
I definitely wanted to see who the fans were, because I'd been away long enough.
I didn't wake up one morning and not be in the Replacements. We're all that forever, and I've just grown older. I mean, I haven't lost anything. I've gained a few things.
I don't think there's anything that will make me stop doing it. There may be a time when it's not available to anyone. You may have to come listen at my basement window... but I can't stop.
I forever felt that I've fallen right between the crack of way too young for the first generation of classic rock 'n' roll and too old to be brand-new. It's hard.
I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.
I like to go to the record store. Every time I do, I wander up and down the aisles and nine times out of 10, I don't buy anything.
I put myself in all the songs I love. The singer's singing to me, y'know? I'm flattered, but it doesn't affect me, really.
I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.
I sat through Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones like three times at the Skyway when it came out.
I think it should be evident by now, but I'm as lost as anyone.
I think of the Replacements only when they're brought up to me. For two years, I'm at home, they don't really cross my mind. I still hear them on the radio. I'm not ashamed of anything we did.
I think that there's not a joke on this record, where once there always was for comic relief. I simply was incapable of coming up with one this time.
I'm always slightly baffled when I get done with a record, because to my ear it sounds like what I would like to hear on the radio.
I'm beyond caring what anyone expects of me anymore.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a lot of great rock movies.
I'm not dissatisfied with my place in it rock 'n' roll.
I've got a bootleg copy of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones. I like that better than Gimme Shelter, actually.
I've had more people in my life take their lives than... I think it's out of proportion with most people. I think a lot of them gravitate towards me because of the music.
It was a teenage dream to be a rock 'n' roll star, and I think I came as close as I ever wanted to and it's much closer to artist now.
It's fun, but the fun is where it always was. I mean, it's still fun to strap on my Les Paul in the basement and turn up the Marshall amp. I'm still 15. I still enjoy that as much as I ever did.
It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.
It's my first record since my son is old enough to understand and I can't even show it to him. Yes, it's affected me, probably in the opposite of how anyone would have thought.
Mono is certainly a bad influence.
Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.
Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don't understand the concept.
Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.
So I figured in keeping with the record, I'd do something off the wall which is show up for free and wing it... I don't know, I'm just going to play some songs. I think it'll be fun.
Songs aren't really written that way. You take something that inspires you, and it might just be a roaring pack of lies.
Stick with your heart and you'll be fine.
The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.
The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.
The key is myself and Tommy (Stinson), if we get together, that would be the catalyst and he seems to be pretty engaged in his Guns N Roses thing at the moment. I'm not asking him to leave that, so we'll just see what happens with it.
The truth is overrated.
Then again, I think about high school every day and I think about being a little kid every day too.
To have a lot of people clap is not my goal, so it took me a few years to realize that I am an artist more than a wannabe rock 'n' roll star.
You know, he likes me because I'm his son. I have to go long and far to find someone who knows me just as me, rather than me the songwriter or whatever.
Replacements fans used to honor the singer with the graffiti, "P.W.I.G." It stood for, "Paul Westerberg is God."
In December 2006, Paul injured himself in an accident at home. He was using a screwdriver to trim wax off a candle, and severely damaged his left hand. His injury will potentially put him out of commission through the beginning of 2007.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!