Pat Smear Quotes

In a band that works out well, everybody has a certain role to fulfill.

The best thing about this band is I'm the leader!

I felt I never needed to fight for a more prominent songwriting and increased vocal role with the Cars.

I absolutely am not the 'de facto front man' in The Mob - that title surely goes to Russell Allen, who is one of the best front men in the business. I am just happy to be part of the band and not necessarily leading it.

We kind of established in Sons of Apollo right from the get go that it would be a very collaborative process musically, but after that, I was going to take the reins and control everything else beyond that the way I did with Dream Theater.

In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.

When you're in a band and there's five of you, you have to accommodate five people in every song.

It feels like my job is to support people. I support great artists. When I worked with a symphony, I sat in the third chair, not the first chair.

If you're truly in a band and you guys have been together for a long time, there's a family bond that you have. In fact, I've talked about this with therapists, especially if you're talking about a relationship, because when you're with somebody, you're going to your family, and she's alone.

When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn't there.

I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.

I mean, I think I liked every band I ever played in because each band was different, each band had a different concept, and each band leader was different... different personalities and musical tastes.

I'm a little more of a lead instrument in the Meatbats.

Being in a band is a really magical thing because you've got a family and you operate as this one entity. It's very democratic; everyone is involved in the output. But within that, there can be a lot of disagreements and strife.

Movies are a team sport now, and I want to play singles.

I've actually thought very little about solo work up until just very recently. Most of it is because in my band, Incubus, it is very much a collaborative effort. I do what I do in the band, and everyone plays their respective parts, but in the end, we are sort of a democratic process.

We became friends as we became a band. Our friendship evolved as the band evolved. It had its ups and downs, but it was mostly ups for the four of us. We got along well almost all of the time. Hey! We liked each other and we still do.

Bands work in a way where everyone, at some point, has to have a similar idea of how you do things.

Luckily, I'm in a band with two other guys who really pull their own weight and have the skills and abilities to compensate for my weaknesses.

I feel like fifteen years with Fleetwood Mac was like working on my thesis, doing research for some kind of paper.

When you have four guys in a room writing songs, it different. It's great - that's what makes a band a band. Audioslave was great.

'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.

I've had the new band experience plenty of times, and sometimes, it just sort of peters out.

I love working with my band-mates in Alkaline Trio, but to make a rock record that was just mine was something that I wanted to do.

When it comes to being in a band or going solo, one is collaborative, and one is not. But generally speaking, when going solo, I am the boss. People can contribute ideas, but I am the boss. When collaborating, you make compromises and look for a common ground.