I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.
It's Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.
I am so proud to be a Philadelphian. I believe there's a different drive and hustle that's instilled in us.
Essex is an amazing county, with its own set of rules. It's a completely different world.
New York reminds me a little bit of Canada and my upbringing. Los Angeles is like living in a vacation, and you have to pinch yourself every once and a while.
If something is not right we give out about it. He is almost a Yorkshireman with a Portuguese accent.
A lot of Texans go up to New York and stay there forever. If there are any two places with more individual characters, I don't know them.
I'm a California girl, and I'd love to restore a sense of place to Southern California.
The truth about the Costa del Sol is that what endures, what is worthwhile, is what is Spanish.
So I live in Los Angeles, and it's kind of a goofy place. They have an airport named after John Wayne. That ought to explain it. It has a charming kind of superstitious innocence.
This is Manchester, we do things differently here.
Going to Santa Fe is like going to Greece. It's not that special compared to other areas. The pinon pines are no different than pinon pines elsewhere. But there has been culture there longer than in most places, and you feel it.
The Long Island experience is so strange. You're a satellite around the city, so the presence of the city is always looming.
There is a bedrock decency to people in the Midwest. They are thoughtful and ready to help you if something needs to be done.
I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all.
All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.
Native plants give us a sense of where we are in this great land of ours. I want Texas to look like Texas and Vermont to look like Vermont.
To be in the South in my first big job was very nostalgic. There is an energy to the way we do things in the South.
Texas is still resistant to Howard Johnsons, interstate highways and some forms of phoniness. It is the place least likely to become a replica of everyplace else. It's authentically awful, comic, and weirdly charming, all at the same time.
California lacks a lot of the rules and restrictions the East has. Every house is a different style, different material, different color. There's a lot of craziness out there.
I grew up in Stoneham, a little suburb of Boston. It's pronounced 'Stone 'em' because Massachusetts doesn't bend to the will of 'how letters are supposed to be said.'
There is a gentleness in Michigan that you just can't replicate.
There's something about Southern characters.
There's a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It's absolutely a world onto itself.
The Midwest breeds funny, eccentric people, to varying degrees. You play shows not because you're expecting to get a record deal, but to do something fun outside of mowing lawns. Everything else is just gravy... Or mustard.
