On the musical side, I always wanted to kind of carry on Pink Floyd's sound. You know, Pink Floyd always had such an original, creative and masterful sound, but there are no new albums. My thought was that there's a way to keep their sound alive.
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.
I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.
And it's been a process of digging through the songs and trying to make them born on stage again. I think they are very different. I think they come off very differently. I think they come off, I don't know if it's masculine or outward, extroverted than introverted. I didn't know. It's just been a process.
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.
I love rearranging and reimagining tunes, so I want my audience to enjoy hearing songs in a new way and make their own discoveries.
I totally hate when somebody takes a classic and desecrates it. I like Jimmy Page and P. Diddy, but what they did to 'Kashmir' was a debacle.
Every time I do a cover, I completely... pick apart - I take apart the entire song and really reconstruct it. I try and make it my own.
I just want to be a part of a band that will be able to reinvent themselves, you know.
In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.
It's pretty cool that artists like Flo Rida and Bingo Players can be inspired to interpret a song like 'Piano in the Dark' in completely new genres. As an artist and writer, it's the highest compliment we can be paid.
It's like, whenever I do any kind of cover, if it's a jazz piece or pop cover, I want to honor the original and make sure that the bulk and the juice of what makes that so great is there, but take it to a different place.
'Too Young to Fall in Love' is an earlier cut from Motley Crue, but it's one of their best. I'm so drastically different as an artist from their sound, but the challenge of making it my own is what makes doing a cover song fun.
When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.
It was amazing to remake and rewrite a song like 'Sweet Like Chocolate.' It feels like a good way to come back.
