I look upon myself as a musical bricklayer with architectural aspirations.
Wintertime for me is a time when I do a lot of my writing in the studio. It's a time I enjoy. And it's very reflective and a very calming time of the year. Throughout the year I gather a lot of musical inspirations, and this is where I bring them to the studio and see what will evolve musically.
I'm doing a play, a musical. The musical follows the Mamma Mia concept. It's my first LA theater project.
That creates the magic, and that's the wonderment of the musical process and how precious that is.
When I was at the Group for Musical Research, with this idea of discovering electronic music, I quickly realized that that it was a very interesting and exciting approach to music, but I also saw that it was very intellectual and quite dogmatic.
Looking back, I think I was always musical. My dad was very musical, and I think my mom was musical.
I don't like to be entertaining. I don't like the feeling of being entertaining. If there was a musical or a comedy that was not just for entertainment but was rooted in something I could relate to on a real level, then I think I would do it.
I've been doing musical theater since I was a kid. And look for a CD from me in the future. I want to write all the songs!
Rock guitarists usually do not wish to think trains of thought about anything but their own guitar playing during a long solo, and I could not play this way if I were not able to divide my attention between my ever changing musical environment and my instrument itself.
If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.
We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
I would do a movie musical.
I'd love to do a musical. I have a little list of them in my head.
Andy Rourke and I had been playing together from 14 or 15, and we had a very great musical chemistry. Andy's just a very respected and unusual musician.
I actually got to write with one of my musical heroes, a guy named Raine Maida from Our Lady Peace. I got to sit down and write some songs with him, and that was pretty heavy. I listened to Our Lady Peace growing up. It got me through the teenage angst.
I think, you know, people think of the city of New Orleans as a parochial place where it's a lot of folks who are from there and a lot of big families, a lot of musical families, a lot of history, a lot of tradition, but I like to think of New Orleans as an idea.
I've been reading scripts where they've been doing a lot of singing now, but within the dark, realistic story line. I would love, love, love, love to do that. But not a musical on Broadway, I don't have that kind of energy or stamina.
My grandad's a gospel singer, and his children were singers, too. But I don't believe in God in the same way... not religion; it breaks us up too much. The same with musical styles - it breaks people up. I believe they are all one thing - why not put them together?
Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
Musical theater has sort of always been there for me, but I haven't always treated it with the same reverence as it's treated me.
I've learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.
Strangely enough, when the Sugababes' 'Freak Like Me' went to number 1, which was built around my 'Are 'Friends' Electric' song, I had another song called 'Rip' go to number 1 in the Kerrang TV chart, so I was pulling new people in from very different areas of musical interest. That was quite an amazing week.
One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
Setting my mind on a musical instrument was like falling in love. All the world seemed bright and changed.
I feel that I speak the musical language.
But it is equally necessary to consider the implications for a society if there are fewer and fewer young people making music because we are economising on music schools or musical education in schools.
I wouldn't say no to other kinds of musical opportunities. I guess that it just depends on what it was or what it required me to do, and if I felt that it compromised my own soul.
I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear.
Scales played in the correct musical way are very exciting and rewarding.
I auditioned for a musical, and I can't sing. It was a kid's film musical, not a stage show, so I thought I could get away with it.
Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.
My background is from India, and I always get asked, 'When are you going to do an Indian film, a musical or Bollywood film?'
The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
I got the regular call, that they were doing a Broadway musical of Hairspray, and would I come and audition. I was familiar with the movie, because at the time it came out my lover wrote for Premiere magazine, and we had to see everything.
After 'The Blues Brothers,' I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly.
The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.
