Halloweenhead.

Words.

"Yeah, I am doing what I want, but one of the interesting things about the Internet when you’re a musician is the sociology of the fans, the psychology of being a fan, and observing this negative and positively weird behavior. It’s kind of hard to explain this, but there’s this weird illness with people where it’s almost like they view their [favorite] artist as a football team or something, and all other artists are another team. [Laughs.] Or even sometimes, your records become sports teams. You put out a new record, and it’s like, “Tonight at Dodger Stadium, it’s the Easy Tigers vs. the Heartbreakers.” It’s super-competitive, and it’s a highly judgmental place for a place that should be free of judgment. My feeling about music is that it’s a place to go to get away from fucking negative creeps. And now, what’s really weird is that music is full of negative fucking creeps.


You remember: When we were growing up, if you bought Metal Hammer, or if you were reading Hit Parader, or Kerrang!, or something, it didn’t seem to me like there were a lot of articles saying, “Fuck Mötley Crüe, man. They suck.” Or, “Theatre Of Pain is a shitty record, and nothing is ever gonna be as good as Too Fast For Love.” It was like, “Okay, Theatre Of Pain,” and maybe there would be people that didn’t totally understand the record, or that snideness was there, but it didn’t seem to be, when I was growing up, that snarkiness equaled intelligence. There’s this weird trend in the music community where people have read snarky, highly intelligent reviewers to the point where they have taken the wrong idea. Instead of saying that intelligence equals wit, and being witty about things being fucking awesome or being shit, it’s only manifested itself in saying, “Oh, well, witty people are smart, and when I read witty people, they’re always saying negative things,” so there’s this negative trend. The trend is to find something wrong with everything."-Ryan Adams

THE A.V. CLUB: INTERVIEW: Ryan Adams