Devin Townsend Quotes

In terms of the theoretical components of what I do, it's all auto-pilot. Like, I don't think about music. I just pick at it 'till it stops irritating me.

For me as a musician, there is this weird transition thing. I mean, I love to make music and everyday that goes by I think get a little dumber, to be honest. You know when you are 21, you are like 'this is what it's all about; this is the meaning of life' and then you know you're 40 and you're like 'okay, as long as I can pee in public I am okay at this point'.

To be a vessel, a conduit to a collective unconscious where all the music had seemingly existed for eternity, seemed a fantastic reason to be involved in the process.

I got into and enjoyed occult things in my teens, and, no, I don’t have any real points to make on the actual nature of either

It’s been twenty-five years of it, man, and like I said at the beginning of the interview, I’m really happy, I really am. I often have to pinch myself, that I even have relevance of any sort. I get to do all sorts of cool shit, I get tons of free toys and it’s great. My family’s healthy and I’m healthy. It’s great. So looking at it from that point of view, yeah, it’s awesome. But to me, I don’t think I’ve been relevant to the metal scene for years. It’s funny because sometimes folks go out of their way to try and defend me, and I’m like, 'No, don’t, dude.' I’m making puppets and fart jokes, and it’s not because I’m trying to be provocative or I’m lazy or whatever. It’s just less about music for me now than it is about making Tetris pieces work melodically.

The drive to fit in, the drive to succeed, the drive to conform to the expectations of what other people assume one should be, just leads people to repressing the parts of their personality that makes them unique, in a sense. Everybody is on this quest to look a certain way or to be a certain way or to fit into a certain mold, because society and media and anything implies that we will never reach that. There is whole industries devoted to ensuring that you will always quest for without ever actually attaining it. We're all.. never going to succeed.