To the general public in America, the lifespan of Deep Purple probably finished with our 1984 album, 'Perfect Strangers.'
The Ramones were American, and I knew about them, and I thought they were interesting. But they were like a pop band to me.
We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time.
The misunderstanding out there is that we are a 'hard rock' band or a 'heavy metal' band. We've only ever been a rock n' roll band.
I'm only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band's own perception of their music and existence. If you commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you.
I actually think the band doesn't need the television show. And I actually think the television show holds it back. No one at radio wants to play a band that's on a television show.
For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.
I don't think Metallica sits around all day wondering why country music fans don't embrace them.
I mean it was weird. But Phoenix watched us every night. But it's like they're not even a band, they're like a corporation. They bring a staff of like 40 people.
After 'City of Evil,' the world was still kind of apprehensive about Avenged Sevenfold. They didn't know if we were a serious band or just some kids trying to play really ambitious music with crazy guitar parts that would be here one minute and gone the next.
People are disappointed when they hear my American accent because they regard 'The Police' as an English band but I've clung to my American-ness all the way.
I think Everclear is a weird combination of a singer-songwriter and a hard-rock band. That's why some people really dig the band, and some don't.
When the second album came out, everybody gravitated immediately to the three and a half minute rock tunes and ignored the ballads. They thought all the Raspberries were was players of high-energy rock songs.
We've always been fans of groups like Little Feat, Steely Dan, the Eagles, or Dire Straits that have that quality. Bands that sometimes are perceived as not the 'cool' band, because they're so good in a technical sense.
Some of the journalists who've ended up writing about our band - and this is disappointing to say - have a very narrow outlook. And because of that they fundamentally misunderstand us.
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.
The type of band that I have now, the type of music that we're playing you either like it or you dislike it. If you dislike it, you probably don't know why. By the same token, you can't even really say why you like it.
It caught us by surprise when people started calling us a boy band because we'd always considered ourselves pretty serious musicians.
No one has a better idea of what Chvrches is than we do.
Most of the fans of Calpurnia are 'Stranger Things' fans, which is not a big deal at all. They're super loyal and incredible, and really do like the music. It's the people who aren't fans of the music and are just there because of 'Stranger Things' that really bother me.
A lot of people don't even know there was a Journey before Steve Perry.
