I think Celebritarianism is best defined by whoever is interested in it. That doesn’t mean that it has no universal meaning. It just means that people who don’t understand what it is aren’t going to understand it if they’re explained it, although I don’t think there’s any wrong way to understand it, either. It’s a little complex in that it could never be a religion of sorts that had any sort of organization because it is much like DaDa and surrealism. It doesn’t even believe in the world it exists in, so therefore it itself cannot exist, unless it acknowledges that it is something that is too abstract to define. Then it becomes a complete mindfuck where you become lost inside yourself.

Letting go and getting lost in yourself is kind of the center of where I find my life now. I find my life moving forward and elements of that contain the idea of being a celebrity -- and that’s probably the least important element of the word –- which would seem like it’s the most obvious, relevant point of it, because it’s almost a play on the word. It’s more about, for me, looking back at all the art I’ve created, it’s about the examination of our culture’s desire to really enjoy - whether admitted or not – a guilty enjoyment of the worship of death; the worship of martyrdom; the promotion of fame at any cost; dying when there’s enough people watching. It's an idea that has been implanted in people’s heads that has created a culture that spawns the assassination of John F. Kennedy; that spawns the Oklahoma bombings; that spawns Harris and Klebold; that spawns 9/11. People realizing full well that they can get exactly what they want and we’re always willing to give it to them. So, in that sense, Celebritarianism realizes and acknowledges that.

In a sense, it is a journalistic art approach that is an attack and a complete and utter desire to destroy what journalism has become. If it were a magazine, it would be something that caught fire when you opened it and burned your hands because you deserved it for reading it. That’s a bit of an explanation to let people delve into it much more than they want. I chose to call it Celebritarian Corporation because I think that provides a further irony into what it represents. It’s a group of artists that is continuing to grow and we’ve combined together. People who are in a stage in their lives where they’ve accomplished enough to get to the point where – sometimes you don’t realize that you’re at the point that you worked for. I almost, unfortunately, missed out on the part that you dream about getting to. I almost got to this point and wanted to give up because of frustration and negativity that was draped over me like a wet blanket.

A lot of changes have taken place. Things have worked out in the past in a magical, unexplainable way and then there’s been periods when that feeling of everything tied together slipped away and I think it’s a matter of who you surround yourself with. Without whining about the troubles I’ve gone through, I think it’s been a year of finishing a tour on a high note and then dealing with the music industry and the people who are managing me. Everyone around me seemed to have very little faith in a lot of the other things I wanted to do. However, these things, when I do them, I’ve found them to be very rewarding and very successful and it was because I did them on my own most of the time. I think sometimes it’s people’s fear about being replaceable or being irrelevant.

Of course, there is a completely separate problem. I’ve got a band that I’m friends with and the idea of me not doing music means they have to worry about what they’re going to do. That’s hard for me to take into consideration because I feel responsible in a lot of ways – especially Pogo, for example. I made him a promise that I’ll never break: We will never separate, because it started between the two of us and that will never change, no matter what happens. If he wants to go back to reading science books and playing with army men on stage, I’m fine with that. He’s such a genius and I think there’s been so much wasted talent or unused creativity because, when you make a record, you may do a photo shoot and you pick one or two pictures from something that contained a lot more ideas and it can be frustrating, aside from any money concerns, just the idea that you’ve got this creativity and there’s nowhere to put it. It doesn’t fit into the confines of the rock n roll music industry because people aren’t really interested in creativity. When I say “people,” I mean people in the general sense, the people that, whoever they are, buy the records that we all hate. I suppose if I were alive and standing alongside some of my heroes, writers -- Andre Breton and Salvidor Dali -- They would be saying “Those people don’t exist. This is all a farse.” as they did during World War I when they said that people weren’t being killed; that they were all actors.

Surrealism’s affect on the worldis something I think we’ve taken for granted because the surrealists were expelled from Europe by Hitler because they were threatening to the way European’s think. They were presenting a different reality, an unnatural way of looking at the world; painting things differently than you see them; working from their imagination, mixing media. It was all degenerate to everyone. They came to America and they did anything from Marcell Duchamp and his urinal to some of the manifestos of surrealisms that say things that wouldn’t sound out of place next to Harris and Klebold’s diaries because they were bombastic and completely unafraid to say what they thought. It’s so rare to see that now. You may see it in the underground, where unfortunately a few people are listening. You’ll never see it above ground unless it’s some sort of posture that is purely created for marketing purposes.

I’ve tried to maintain that in my time, but I’ve realized that I had more to do. I wasn’t going to be done with music. It became a turning point. I had to realize that things were depressing and crumbling around me and you have to let go. You have to be willing to hit bottom and you either end up dead or the person who may or may not be – for whatever reason – destroying you, whether it’s intentional or not – will jump ship because of fear or sinking with you. In turn, they will destroy themselves. In a sense, that is what had to happen in my life, in general, with my business world, which is a world that is kind of alien to me. I’m not naive and I’m not trustworthy and foolish. I’m a writer and I’m an artist; I don’t want to worry about counting numbers and things like that. I don’t want people who don’t believe in me to be exploiting me and telling me to do things for the wrong reasons. When you make it clear that -- if you can’t do the things that you want, then you’re not doing anything and you may very well disappear from the world entirely; you begin to find out who your real friends are. I feel I have a strong relationship with my real friends than ever before because of them standing by me and saying “Well, if that’s what you want to do, we’ll go down with you because you brought us here, and we want to go with you.”

The joy of the storm clouds clearing and realizing that, you know what, everything seems to feel so much better now. We might as well just make that record; and I suppose that’s the most important announcement to make. We have – and when I say we, I would credit Tim mostly – over the course of this year compiled around twenty songs. They’re completed songs and only have vocals to be added. The music has been created and has come from a secret place. It’s really something we hid from the world because we didn’t want the world to know what would be coming. I find that this record will probably be the one that is like the part in the movie where everything changes and then there’s either a happy or sad ending. It’s the point where everything goes in a different direction.

That’s a lot like how I felt when we did Mechanical Animals because it was such a drastic leap into a different direction. That record was written in a completely different way with a completely different intent. It had two sides to it: A level of sarcasm that had referential music elements to it. It had nods to all of the things I liked when I grew up: Kiss, Bowie, Queen, T-Rex, and Iggy Pop. A lot of lazy and foolish journalists assume that we weren’t intelligent enough to do something like that, so it must have been purely just derivative, which makes the point of the record even more comical because I was defying people’s expectations of what they wanted me to be; what kind of a rock star they wanted to create and merchandise to fit into a small, easy to define package.

This album comes from a lot of different places, but I’d call it a romantic record and not in like holding hands and walking in the moonlight, but romantic like the unfulfilled yearning to be in another time or another place where you feel like you would fit in better. That’s something that everybody can relate to. It also has a lot to do with a yearning to find another person to share that with. It’s the struggle that you have looking for that. It’s very unlike anything we’ve done. It’s also very dark in a sense. I think it will probably be talked about as being very guitar oriented and very melodic and almost rock n roll in the sense that it feels and sounds very much like a band forming. It also has some surreal elements that throw it into a weird place that doesn’t quite fit.