I Think Closing-off Is The Most Detrimental

I've Always Been A Fan First And Foremost - Obsessing Over Bands And Seeking Out Bands, And Spending Hours And Hours Listening. When I Played Music, The Scope Of My Fandom Became More Myopic; I Was Focusing On The Bands We Were Touring With, Or The Bands On The Label. And You're Always Positing Yourself In Relation To Other Bands. Since I Haven't Been Playing, I Feel A Little Less Cynical. I'm Able To Seek Out Music And Approach It Strictly As A Fan.

The Natural World Operates By Its Own Set Of Rules. The Animal World, All The Places That Are Feral And Ungovernable, That's Where I Find A Lot Of Inspiration. There Is Just As Much Beauty There, But There Is Also Decay And Violence.

I Wrote So Much About Fandom And Participation For Npr That I Eventually Realized My Most Fertile Way Of Participating In Music Is To Actually Play It, At Least In A Way That Made The Most Sense To Me.

To Me, That Ugliness, That Grotesqueness - That's The Essence [of Life]. That's Where You Realize, It's Not About All The Consonance And The Harmony. It's All The Parts That Are Wrong That Help Explain Why We're Drawn To Something - What The Mystery Is - Just As Much As The Beautiful Things.

There Was This Kind Of Wackiness That Was Really Embraced And Put On A Pedestal. It Was Before The Millennium. We Were Envisioning A Future That Was Mostly Idealistic. I Think That Came Crashing Down A Little Bit In 9/11, Or A Lot. There Is Something About Portland That Does Seem To Still Exist In This Total Idealistic World And Total Idealistic Mind Frame, And I Think That's What Dream Of The '90s Is Talking About.