I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. … I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.

I'm fucking sick of people who always try to blame movies, bands, songs, or talk shows for whatever the fuck hits them today – teen suicides, drug overdoses or everything else. If someone is stupid enough to kill himself because of a song, then that's exactly what they deserve – they weren't contributing anything to the society – it's one less idiot in the world. There's too many people – if more people kill themselves over music, it wouldn't disappoint me. What would disappoint me is that people are that stupid.

If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.

I can't stand the lyrics.

What song do I hate? I think "Daughters," by John Mayer, would be a good candidate. I don't know why he bugs me so bad."

"I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics'.

You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics', right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behaviour norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.

What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs — especially today — is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go fuck", or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" — but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song.

When they get into drooling about love as a 'romantic concept' — especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types — that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health.

Fortunately, lyrics over the last five or six years have gotten to be less and less important, with 'art rock groups' and new wavers specializing in 'nonjudgemental' or 'purposely inconsequential' lyrics. People have stopped listening to the lyrics — they are now only 'pitched mouth noises'."

I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri

I make music to make you sick of fake music
Hate music like devil worshippin' Satan music
So say your prayers—your Hail Mary's and Jesuses
Take two sticks, tape 'em together and make a crucifix

My music is not lovely.

If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it — I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

I know I'm going to get shit for saying this, but yeah, I don't want to be too happy. To write I have to feel slightly sorry for myself. You have to be in a slightly self-obsessed state of mind to sit at a piano for six hours and not worry about meeting someone for a date. My best songs come when I have that feeling that I've left the party early. And the other reason our songs are all about struggling and worrying and being beleaguered is my dad. He's a terrible worrier. He's always after the next thing. And I am too. Luckily the other members are more relaxed. Three other members like me and we'd go nuts.