I was in a choir as a kid. It was from those early days that my outlook on harmonies and arrangements were nurtured. I always took that with me, even on the earliest Bad Religion record, which strangely was only about six years after that.
I guess rock stars are role models for the kids who listen to that music. My role models have all been geologists - you know, the guys who are doing fieldwork until they're 70.
It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.
I've written almost 200 songs with Bad Religion. No matter where you look in our history, the focus has been trying to instill some of these disturbing realities about the world, some of the implications of evolution into an artistic format that can be interpreted by people who may never study evolution.
I struggled to keep one foot in music and one in academia. I had worked on my Ph.D. for three years full time before I realized Bad Religion could be a legitimate career.
The trick is: how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word 'god' for 'natural selection' in a lot of evolutionary writings and you'd think you were listening to a theologian.
The thrill of science is the process. It's a social process. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation and it's verification of claims that might be false. It's the greatest foundation for a society.
Most songwriters who have been lucky enough to have their song on the radio or be heard widely don't know anything about science. The best songs have a strong dose of metaphor. Most songs about science don't have that. Like 'She Blinded Me With Science.' It's a stupid song, no offense to Thomas Dolby.
I've known a lot of people who were punkers who went on to get academic degrees. Very few of them, however, continued their active role in the punk community. Most of them hung up their leather jacket when they did so.
I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
The vocal arrangements are a big part of the formula for a Bad Religion song - layered harmonies and background vocals. So when I start to describe the elements of Bad Religion's sound, it starts to sound like a Christmas choir.
I view music as entertainment. When I'm on stage, I don't look at that as a platform for sharing ideology. Otherwise I'd be a zealot myself. That's why, when people ask me, 'Do you think you can change the world through your music?' I say, 'I doubt it.'
I think English punk died in '79 or '80. Maybe '82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn't the same as English punk. It wasn't a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don't think American punk ever died.
I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.
I bill myself as a naturalist because if you say you're a naturalist, it gives people a conversation point to talk about what you actually do believe in, instead of when you say you're an atheist, and it's really just a statement of what you don't believe in.
Almost everyone shuts down when science becomes too technical; you've got to infuse it with entertainment and storytelling to make it effective. From high school on, science is taught in a very dry manner, which isn't as potent.
Academic scientists aren't generally interested in books for the public. So when one comes out, the authors can't expect much praise from scientists. My goal both as a singer and an instructor is to educate through provocation and entertainment.
When I was a teenager, science meshed with my developing ideals - such as the challenge to authority that was central to punk rock. In science, anyone from any walk of life could make a discovery that would overturn prevailing hypotheses. And that was a cause for celebration among scientists.
Unfortunately, science cannot be reduced to short, catchy phrases. And if this is all that the general public can comprehend, it's no wonder that we spend so much of our time in the interminable debate about belief in God, or lack thereof.
