I've been obsessed with seeing life through music. My records my relationship with records my relationship with rock stars everything that surrounds it has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.

Creatively I thought we were still viable and could do more records. But our working relationship just wasn't happening at all and our chemistry as people broke down because of that.

Blackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren't able to get a record out through conventional means so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.

We asserted ourselves as a music community and showed legislators that music is positive. Especially if you've sold 300 million records worldwide and pay taxes.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

I've been there and done all that sold millions of records and that doesn't bring you peace.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased.

My first two records are so simply constructed. The reason isn't because I wanted to make simple music. It's because I don't really have the chops.

When you grow up in the music industry trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago ' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.

I remember when I was coming up the music stores where you could get guitar strings was where I got my records from. Now the place where you get your records from is where you can get your DJ mats and your mixers.

I plan to stay in music. I plan to keep making records.

And you have a record company behind it this is a key too you need people to fight for your records at least a little bit. So if you have a great song it's catchy and you've got a little bit of help I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

Oh I will always be honest with my music. The records are black boxes for me. Like if you want to know who I am my views my perspective things I love things I hate my convictions my anthems. I've never let people's opinions affect the way I write.

I love country music blues and punk and one day I might make those kinds of records.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so I was listening to records and I'd play 'em over and over.

I'm always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them.

But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.

I've looked at pictures that my mom has of me from when I was four years old at the turntable. I'm there reaching up to play the records. I feel like I was bred to do what I do. I've been into music and listening to music and critiquing it my whole life.

I have lots of records quite a collection actually that I stole from my mom. I have the original 'Thriller' album and I have a really great 'Elton John's Greatest Hits ' and I also have a N.E.R.D. album. Records sound more original. They have more edge.

If I have any talent at all it's from God and my mom who was on Capitol Records also.

My mom and I used to listen to records read and take train rides across the country in the summer. It was a very chill life. She didn't expose me to anything that was ahead of my development but she expected me to adjust to her world - she did not expect to adjust to mine.

Adversity causes some men to break others to break records.

After he was assassinated his family and the men who had served him continued the lying and began the destruction censoring and hiding of JFK's medical records.