Q&A: Liam Gallagher on Discovering the Beatles and the Death of the Rock Star

With their new album Dig Out Your Soul out and an international tour underway, Rolling Stone caught up with Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher to chat about the first record that blew his mind, how he measures success and God's musical prowess.

I was listening to Dig Out Your Soul on My Space and reading through the comments. Did you check out any of those?
No, I don't do any of that nonsense, MySpace rubbish. I don't listen to comments. I just make the record and hope people like it; if they don't like it I give a shit. I wait to go on tour. That's how I work. That's the music Oasis are making and that's how I judge success, is by making the music you want to make and not having to fucking sell out and make music what other people want you to make.

But the comments have been phenomenally positive, with people saying it's your best album since '95.
That sounds good. That's what I like to hear.

The record has a lot of live energy. Were you thinking of how it would translate to the stage?
I wasn't personally 'cause they're the musicians. I always sing it like it's fucking the last song I ever sing. But I think Noel definitely wanted to be a bit more heavy and not so acoustic.

I know you did a tour with the Black Crowes. Chris Robinson recently was talking to me about the fact if you stay around long enough you become cool again. Seems like that's happening with Oasis here as well.
That's something I think about a lot and I remember Paul Weller telling me that. But I don't worry about that; I'm happy with the way Oasis is. But he was talking about the cycles; it comes and goes. It's like songwriting. It's not a race. It's about the quality you put out more than the quantity. And I love the Black Crowes. The way I judge success is we're doing it on our own terms and that outweighs any fucking success. If I can get through this, the whole Oasis thing, knowing I didn't fucking suck cock, then that is a huge success to me.

Tell me about "I'm Outta Time."
That's a song I had about three years ago and I demoed it in our studio. I got the verses and the music, the chorus took like fucking years to write, I just couldn't get anything. One day I was fucking about and it just happened. I thought, "All right, that's the song done. It's fucking done." I was playing it and the outro goes round and round, it needs something — obviously I'm a big John Lennon fan and it's got a bit of a Lennon vibe, so I thought, "Well, I've got to find a bit of him speaking." So we went through all these old interviews, that's the first one I found, and it just sort of worked. It's not a tribute to John Lennon because if you sat down and tried to write a tribute to John Lennon it'd be fucking rubbish, but it's kind of a nod.

How old were you when Lennon was shot?
I was eight. "Imagine" is the song for me, because I was putting the TV on and I remember that song being on all the time and just thinking, "Who's this guy?" and all that and then obviously you forget about it and go to school. Later on in life I got into the Beatles, the whole band and stuff.