Writing songs with Brian and performing them with Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, David Marks, Bruce Johnston and many other brilliant musicians over the years is my legacy, and something of which I am very proud and protective.
So much of performing is a mind game.
Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.
I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.
I was performing skin grafts and became interested in why skin wouldn't graft permanently.
I love performing. I love getting out there. It's kind of like why I make music.
I got very addicted to performing. I just want to do that more.
LaGuardia High School is a place of acceptance. You have every type of kid there, performing. The outcast girl would not have been made fun of in my high school.
We've taken some performing arts schools on the set of 'Breaking Bad.'
Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.
My mom actually had a band called Six Pack - even though there were seven of them - who went around Chicago performing popular songs. Her voice was like Gladys Knight mixed with Aretha Franklin.
Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.
I decided to always sing in the back with the chorus and never went up front because I had trouble performing.
I find that I get most of the same things I loved about performing in the ring when I do my live shows around the world.
I understand the rock star deal having been one and still going out strapping my guitar on and performing. Now, I probably do 30 or 40 dates a year and I get to relive how I felt at 19 when I played in some really bad bands.