Tom DeLonge Quotes

I remember being inspired by this band Godflesh, actually. They were a really heavy metal band, really nihilistic.

Most of my songs start out as being very aggressive and guitar-driven.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

I'm not a big punk fan, but I love a good, solid screamer.

I like hard, aggressive music.

Nine Inch Nails' sound is dominated by clanging synths and sardonic, shrieking vocals.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

To me, Sabbath was always JUSt a really heavy blues band. That s all we were. We just took those blues roots and made them heavier.

I'm not a country picker, really - I like a nice, beefy, raunchy sort of sound.

Self-examination with a close-up mirror in an antiseptic environment is what Nine Inch Nails is based on.

When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

I've always loved aggressive, hard, noisy, yet melodic bands, and at the same time I've always loved 'Blue' by Joni Mitchell.

I'm recording an album. It's sort of techno mixed with garbage - you, know, intense in-your-face music.

The album was very agressive. It kicks you right in the balls.

When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.

I'm busier than a busy person. People aren't scared to play this raucous, harsh music over radio speakers, so I think it's the perfect time to get in with some real serious, heavy bands.

I have always tended toward extremism: I'm Motorhead rather than REO Speedwagon.

There was a period in my life where most of my musical career was spent in a band that was very aggressive, and there was sort of a wall of volume all the time.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.

I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

I think there's a lot of death metal or doom metal dudes that somehow or another find a groove in it.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.