TOM SCHOLZ

I stay very much undercover and behind the scenes - most places I go, people don't know how important I am. But I will admit that my favorite piece of clothing to wear out is an old T-shirt from a Boston tour that does have a Boston logo. But that doesn't change anything.

I played in a couple of really crummy bands, including one in the dorm I was in at MIT, for a year or two.

Virtually every magazine, newspaper, TV station and cable channel is owned by a big corporation, and they've squashed stories that they don't want the public to know about.

The one thing I will say for digital, and you won't hear me say that many complimentary things about it, is that it's cheap. It pretty much enables anybody to record as long as you can deal with the sound.

Playing live was always definitely a lot more fun. You picture it: working alone in the studio eight or 10 hours a day with nobody else there, being frustrated and driven crazy by all of the things that you have to deal with, vs. thousands of people screaming and singing along with you playing.

If you listen to my tapes, you'd hear 14 different ways to arrange the rhythm guitar behind the harmony vocal, and then 14 different ways with a different vocal. You'd have to really be a music lover to sit through that and find it entertaining. I enjoy it, but I'm easy to please.

We need a free media, not just freedom of speech.

I detest computers. If you had a device like that 30 years ago that froze up constantly, misbehaved constantly, lost your information and screwed up when you needed it the most, it would have been laughable.

I would be involved with music whether I had a career or not. I'm always going to be writing songs and recording them.

Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world.

Music doesn't have to have lyrics; it doesn't have to be a particular type of music - it has the ability to bring out really strong and hopefully good emotional reactions in people.

Analog sounds so much better. I frankly can't listen to digital audio for more than a few hours without really starting to hate what I'm listening to. Even decent 24-bit digital resolution really irritates me after a while.

The public has been sold a bill of goods about the free market being a panacea for mankind.

If things aren't going well, music is what I turn to so I can get away from it, to take my mind somewhere else.

I don't listen to the radio in the car, and I do that because I don't want to be influenced.

I can tell you that I can always recognize a Boston song, even if it's in a noisy place. I can hear that it's Boston even before I know what song it is. If a Boston song comes on in a club or somewhere, I notice that it's Boston, and the second thing I notice is what song it is.

I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren't supposed to do to be popular. But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.

Music is an escape for me.

I can sit down at a piano or with a guitar and just chug away for hours and be perfectly content with whatever comes out. But when it comes to something that somebody else is going to listen to, then I do feel a great deal of pressure to do something that's exceptional, at least in what I consider to be at the limits of what I can do.

I'm not one of those artists who doesn't want to play their most popular songs.

There are an awful lot of people out there that don't want to see Boston go away, and I'm one of them.

I will say that I know Nirvana did a show and played a few chords from 'More Than a Feeling' before they did 'Teen Spirit,' and it wasn't very good. But in all seriousness, 'Teen Spirit' was a great song. If subconsciously or somehow I had any influence on that, I'll take that as a compliment.

I've sort of decided that I can settle for being just the artist, arranger, writer and part-time engineer. That seems like enough to do.

I take chances. I don't limit myself. I don't think anybody who listens to Boston would have predicted hearing a female rapper on the beginning of the song 'Sail Away.' But that's what fit.

I'm never too ambitious when I go into the studio. I always know that I'm just going into the studio to work on or try to develop an idea that I have for a song.