AIMEE QUOTES

"And DANCE FOR GODSAKE DANCE!"

"We've tested our fears for years. Isn't it time we test our dreams?"

"I feel like we were in music high school before and we graduated. There's lot of mistakes that we had made in previous bands, and lessons that we learned and we brought those to the table."

"I remember [HWP bandmates] Mike and Jeff sitting around saying 'this is gonna be the heaviest record we've ever written in our lives.' And I said, 'I don't think I want to do the heaviest record.' I was ready to not be surrounded by metal. I was never a fan of metal, not that I don't like it. But I just never liked it. I've always been a punk-rock girl. So I passed the torch. I think the Kittie girls picked it up."

"We all needed a brand new glow. Musically, we weren't always in the same mindset. But in this band we pretty get along on every level-and I'm knocking on wood as I say that. I think we've found a pretty good mix."

"No offense to any of those fine women, but I never wanted to be in a Veruca Salt kind of band. I mean, I wanted to be in Jane's Addiction. Who didn't?"

"I was never into metal per se. It just ended up that way. Human Waste was like a heavy Jane's Addiction kind of thing. Jamie was an incredible hard music drummer. But we both loved late 70's punk, Siouxsie, the Cure-even the Beatles. We never listened to the kind of music we were playing, ever."

"That was a great period for women [about the new-wave scene 20 years ago]. Things were much more open minded. And if I see one more woman in low waisted pants with her belly button sticking out..."

"On August 23,1998 we went to a cabin in Wrightwood, outside of Los Angeles, put ourselves on lockdown and wrote ferociously. Our first show was September 9th- and we'd only been writing and rehearsing for 2 weeks! That was our first test; to book a show before we were even a band. When we booked the gig, we didn't even know if we'd write a single song together."

"It was so easy to write, because we were able to let go and be who we are. We weren't trying to sound like anything else."

"We are definitely influenced by the sounds and attitude of what we grew up on; Siouxsie, The Cure, Buzzcocks, Punk Rock and right on through... like Fugazi and Jane's Addiction."

"Every thought has a manifestation and everything happens for a reason, not to sound like a hippie. But it got us to where we are now. And that's a good thing."

"Human Waste Project was a beautiful, wonderful thing, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But there was a lot of stuff I wanted to do that I didn't get to because the band was democratic. There were a lot of things that didn't go my way - which was totally great and fine, and I'm happy with everything that went on."

"I play no instruments. I like to stay completely organic [laughs]. As a kid, I played flute in the orchestra. My fourth-grade teacher said, 'you need to be in music.' I instantly took to it. I goofed around on the piano and picked up bass for a bit. I have a really short attention span and my mind understands things a lot better than my fingers do. What I want to hear doesn't come out and I get frustrated. If I pick up a guitar it's totally frustrating. My fingers are like 'No, we don't want to work.'"

"Remember the Red Shoes? There was a ballerina in the film who found red shoes and put them on, and they're magical shoes and she can't take them off. She can't stop dancing. That's kinda like the music should be to me."

"Anger is fine and I like a lot of the bands that do that, but I think I just got all of that out of me on the Human Waste Project. Anyway, I don't think what we're doing is total pop, it's a little rougher. Coming from the bands we came from, there's gonna be that harder edge no matter what. It's just in our gut."

"When people say that, it always makes me laugh [about being called a new wave band]. My theory is that people started calling punk bands new wave when they learned to play too well. As soon as musicians learn to play more than three chords or add synthesizers, they're called new wave."

[Echo says a better description for theSTART's sound is one coined by Pete Shelley in a Buzzcocks biography she read. That phrase was "next wave."] "Actually, it was a paragraph about how if we don't continue to push the envelope and get to the next wave, we'll all die. So, we really try to make a concerted effort to stay away from anything that's current and anything that we've done before. We really do try, but we have short attention spans."

"Lynn [Strait, from Snot] was an incredible force on this planet. For good or for bad, he touched everyone that he met."

"We got to know each other pretty well when our former bands [Human Waste Project and Snot] shared a tour bus. Then, when we'd come home, the three of us were sharing a house with four other people from different bands, two dogs and two cats. You do the math."

"Nobody talks about love anymore. I admire men who can write brilliant love songs and aren't afraid to talk about their women. Boys that are in touch with their femininity all the way back to Bowie, all the way back to the Beatles for Christ sakes! Kurt Cobain, Perry Farrell - he talked about his girl and it's still rocking!"

"Enough of this 'bodies hit the floor,' I don't want to hear about it. Not that I want to hear about all love quotes either, but let's get some diversity."

"That's what the beauty of the Lollapalooza concerts were was that there was something that was different. Also, I remember the diversity of the crowd - you had a rap guy sitting next to a guy in a skirt, for Christ sakes! That was beautiful, that was incredible. It made me happy."

"[Our music] probably fits in the really broad category of post-punk."

"We just try to play whenever we can. We like to perform. If we don't tour we have nothing to do."

"There used to be a rule that Scott, our old drummer, would always tell me to 'sparkle' before every show. We used to always do big huddles before we went onstage."

"I threw my elbow out of socket once [and kept on performing.]"

"The Cure, never gonna happen. I would love to go out with The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, if it was 1986. That was a really great pinnacle in both of their careers. I would probably be the happiest person on the earth. The last time I saw The Cure, I cried for the entire show. I just smiled and cried. I felt like the biggest dork, everyone was laughing at me. There are just so many bands that I wouldn't know what to do if I could tour with them; even bands that you wouldn't think we would go with well. I would love to open for Fugazi."

"People are like 'Why do you sign your name like that? Why do you want anarchy? If there was anarchy right now, people would be stealing your t-shirts.'" She turned to ask us: "If there weren't police for you to call, would you kill me right now? Would you steal my stuff? Would you do horrible things to me? I think it's just a lack of faith in human nature. I think that if, honestly, we were left to our own devices, we would find that we are much kinder than we are with laws and rules. I think that it is human nature to rebel against those laws and rules. I don't think that humans are generally comfortable with authority and with confines. A lot of parents raise their children and say 'You live under my roof, you do what I say.' My mom was like, 'Well, what do you want to do? What do you think? How do you feel? Why did you do that?' People think [anarchy] could never work, but I honestly think that it could. I mean, come on, we aren't inherently evil. It's something that's beaten into you; I mean look at how we eat meat in this country. I am not perfect, nor do I ever plan to be perfect, I try to live my life the best I can, I mean, I am wearing a leather belt. I wouldn't want to look that cow in the face and say, 'Hey buddy, can I have some of your skin to hold my pants up with?' But it was really comfortable for me to buy it where they had already made it a cool thing for me to wear around my waist. But, we are totally desensitized. It's not, 'You are eating cute cow,' you are eating beef. It's not even named after the animal that it is anymore. Everything is nicely laid out and packaged. Did I ramble?"