All Montreal bands have around nine members, I believe.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

I’ve been a huge fan of Chris Martin forever; it’d be awesome to work with him. He’s really kind, and he’s been really encouraging when we’ve met.

I was arrested for lip-syncing karaoke.

In case you’re wondering whether I lip synch, the answer is no… people think so because I sound so good.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

I just love working with Eminem. He’s just one of my favorite rappers, and his lyrics – he’s a true poet, and I enjoy that about him.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

My whole life, I’ve sung and listened to music, and since the beginning, I’ve had iTunes and used Apple Music for streaming.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She’s sort of become my fairy godmother.

I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists – Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

All my momma’s people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

I’m an iPod person.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

Man, that record came out and was real big in Memphis. They started playing it, and it got real big. Don’t know why-the lyrics had no meaning.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.