Avi Kaplan Quotes

It's amazing to me to see how bands evolve and how they take all their influences and come up with their own sound.

The biggest misconception about us is that we're just a rock band. We think our music is a cross-section of many genres; a hybrid of what the six of us have grown up on.

I found my sound early on. Look at U2: they haven't changed their music for 20 years. Anyway, many people come unstuck when they try to change what they do and what they are known for.

I wouldn't want to cover a Hank Williams song in a country-western way. It doesn't occur to me instinctually to re-create productions. I'm interested in re-creating songs. Putting different clothes on them.

Stylistically, we're trying to push things in different ways, but it always comes out sounding like Tool no matter what we're trying to do.

I try to take the foundations of what music is and add some type of twist to it.

It's a great honor when somebody takes your song and does something different with it. That's what music is all about: to constantly change what somebody else has done.

Me as an artist, I've ventured off into doing all types of music. I'll do a jazz album, you know what I mean.

To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.

I'm the renegade of funk. I've made house, techno, rock, funk, reggae... That's why I've been on so many different labels.

They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

My music is a direct reflection of the eclectic person I am. I don't like to be stuck in an R&B box.

I love mixing up my genres.

I tried to take heavy metal... and balled it up and chopped it in half and really tried to create a new form of energy. I really tried to re-shape extreme music as I see it through my eyes.

When I was younger I didn't really know what genre of music I'd want to do because I'd always done so many different types, so many impressions.

I mean, Tool has a style, but we try to make all our songs sound different from each other.

I never thought that I would be creating my own 'cross-over' genre. What I did was very real and organic. I have worked in so many different styles so it all just came together.

I try and make all my songs sound different from each other while doing it in a way that's still me. It's a tricky thing to do.

My favorite band of all time is The Clash. The thing I love about The Clash is they started out as guys who could barely play three chords. They dabbled in reggae, punk, rap, jazz. They came to a sound that could only be defined as The Clash. It was impossible to say what it was. I admire them for that.

When a lot of musicians change styles, their songwriting suffers because they want to be different.

Of course, we didn't survive to play all the way through the '90s, so I can say that - as I said, everybody in the band was aware of this, and we trying to figure out ways to make it different.

I wouldn't go so far as to make 'You Don't Own Me' a tango or 'It's My Party' a hip-hop thing. Believe me, those things have been suggested to me. But I thought if I could stay true to the song, the arrangements would work. I'm really enjoying singing them.

I had to make different kinds of music for everybody but still keep it classic T-Pain at the same time.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.