Band Inspiration Quotes

I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.

At the time I learned drums, I wanted to be the drummer of Hanson. I wanted to be this guy because he was so young, and he was already drumming in the band, you know, so I just wanted to be like him. And later, I discovered hip-hop music at boarding school.

My favorite bands were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk Railroad. If you listen to some of my early music, you can hear it.

The only criterion we used in doing cover material was we wanted to do songs that we wished bands would play when we went out. We were doing Yardbirds and Rolling Stones cover songs-which is not any big deal, but where we were from, all we were getting were Top 40 bands.

We were copying lots of bands, like Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show.

I thought I would be in a band like Arcade Fire or be like Fiona Apple - but pop just made sense to me.

I've created several musical trends, really. That's not because I'm so far out and fabulous. It's because most bands have no ideas of their own. They're so desperate they'll grab at any old straw.

We were so heavily influenced by The Replacements and by a lot of hard core bands like Bad Brains, not that we sounded like them but we were trying to play as hard and fast as we could.

I think that's given inspiration to other musicians. I know, particularly through the 90s, a lot of bands would cite Rush as an influence. I don't think it was so much our music, but more the way we really stuck to our guns.

I thought if Oasis could get away with sounding like The Beatles, I could get away with sounding like Abba.

I've always been very image prone, along the lines of bands like Black Sabbath and even Devo.

Its cool when I meet young guys from other bands who say how much an impact Aerosmith has had on them and how much they like me.I'll give 'em that 'C'mon you don't mean that' routine, but in my heart I know where they're coming from. If I had grown up in the '70's and was into rock n' roll, I know the kind of impact Aerosmith would have had on me. I know the kind of impact that Elvis and Jagger had on me, and while I'm not comparing myself to those guys, I can relate.

I get a lot from great '90s artists like Juliana Hatfield, The Pixies, and bands like That Dog and The Breeders.

I wanted people to say that our music sounds like Porcupine Tree, not that it sounds like King Crimson.

We wanted to be like Radiohead. When they started experimenting with electronic music, it gave us the idea that it might be a cool idea to do.

The Rolling Stones set the bar to where I look to as a band. But I don't envision myself touring in the way they do. My knees won't hold out.

I love jamming with my band because the guys inspire me every time. We all get off on each other's playing.

We were big Clash fans, you know, big Who fans and I think we would listen to this music and talk about music and do nothing but music night and day, and when it came time to actually making our own music, you feel compelled to sort of tuck all those influences away, not show them.

I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'

I kind of remember a friend of mine saying, like, you guys should make a rap record. You know, because we were already making punk records. We were a punk band. And I kind of thought, that's crazy.

I made the big turnaround in the early Nineties when I started hearing all the tenth generation punk bands like Green Day and Offspring and all those people. It just made me fall in love with punk again and remember my roots, and since that time I've always wanted to do more of that kind of music again.

I was sick of fast, aggressive music; I felt like I needed to make a poppy thing. But, right now, I feel like I need to make a Hawkwind/Sabbath record. It gets boring if you just do the same thing all the time.

All I really wanted to do was make an album that was going to be just back to what I like to do... And it was a coincidence that these new bands, this new wave of bands, were doing Alice and Iggy rock.

You just have to have a song that you're desperate to play along to, and for me it was 'Turn' by the Scottish band Travis. I went to see them headline the Scottish T in the Park Festival, so after that festival, I went home and taught myself all of the Travis back catalog with an old guitar and a little chord book.

But KISS inspired me personally to pick up a guitar and go for it.