Whenever anyone sends me a link to a band, saying, 'These guys sound exactly like Soundgarden,' it's always some super simple sludge riff with a singer that sings high and screechy. And it's really awful.

I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be.

To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early '90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you're looking at three guys that look like people you go to school with.

Children should always feel like the adults are living in this world to nurture them, to take care of them, to protect them from any bad thing that might come.

A band that makes records and tours is also a business. That's usually where a lot of disagreements come. It's four guys who are musicians and don't really know much about business, but are very passionate and have very specific ideas.

If you're an American kid, you can't help but be influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones because they're always on the radio.

What's important is to get into shape and then not to have to worry about it. I don't want to get on stage and not being able to do something. Not being physically fit doesn't work for me.

I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early.

I've had a long career and I want to continue to have a long career. The way to do that is not to go away.

When you have four guys in a room writing songs, it different. It's great - that's what makes a band a band. Audioslave was great.

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.

I've always felt like there's a certain amount of doing what I do, and performing and making records and doing interviews and photo shoots and that, that are kind of a necessary evil of getting my music to people's ears to hear. Over the years, I've just become more tolerant of that.

I think that one of the main privileges of what I do, which I am just starting to learn, is to have the ability to travel all over the world and experience different cultures.

No matter what, I can't sound like John Lennon. But I can do Tom Jones.

They're a great audience, kids. They actually respond. They don't have the references that adults have, so everything is immediate. It's always interesting to see what they react to in whatever I'm working on at the moment. And they don't even want to discuss why. That's a lesson to remember: My son doesn't care about why.

Obviously, I want my kids to be happy, and I believe that they can be super successful at whatever they want to do, but don't make the successful part more important than the process of doing it. Especially if it's an artistic endeavor.

The first time I ever went to Hawaii, I was listening to island music, thinking, 'I could've been born here, and I'm pretty sure I would never play that.'

Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.