I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
When you're in the music business, everything is very personal, because you are invested in everything; there's a very deep, personal attachment to your music.
My father loved music. He loved Motown and R&B, and my mother loved Journey and Fleetwood Mac, so they were always listening to it and playing it.
If you listen to most of my songs, the lyrics are pretty kind of dark, but I like to put it behind happy music because then it evens it out... I'm really happy, actually. Obviously I have my bad moments, but I always challenge myself to not put negativity out there because there's already enough.
My music is really fun music, with some pan-African and pan-American influences.
The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.
I was always a singer. But I was always focused on being an actor as my trade. Music I do just for me. The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible.
Although my music is electronic, it has a lot of influences from my past, which is all sorts of genres; I've been in a rock-metal band for a long time, and I still feel like, personally, I have a lot of influence from that. My classical influence, you can find spots here and there.
Music and dance is part of everything in New Orleans. So I grew up appreciating it all.
I think the best thing an artist can do is not hang out with other artists. I really dislike hanging out with musicians, for the most part, except for a few select friends, because I don't like to talk about music all the time.
If I know you're very good in music, I can predict with just about zero accuracy whether you're going to be good or bad in other things.
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
When I graduated from high school, the teacher said I was throwing my life away following music, and the same teacher invited me back to speak at the school. I don't say that to brag, I just want to be an example.
The last time I heard real screaming in the theatre was when I went to see a movie I did years ago, called 'Wait Until Dark.' Now, my mother was the least emotional person on the planet, but when I got killed in the movie, she stood up and screamed, 'That's my son!' At Radio City Music Hall in New York!
I find music distracting - it takes me out of my head. What I love so much about skiing is the peacefulness.
Lemaitre has been one of my inspirations ever since I started making music.
I love music and I love to dance.
The William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh... was the place where Champagne Music was born.
I didn't imagine getting to 50, let alone still be playing music. When I was 18, I thought it'd all be over by the time I was 21.
By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them.
There are stories that people don't want to talk about that brought this music through.
I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.
Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.
There are peaks and valleys in anything and that is especially true for the music business. It is very inconsistent. But if you are wise, you can let those downs really bring you to another level of your personality.
I think it has been a weird mistake to have people with their own music careers going on and judging people because when they're too critical, it affects them. They don't want to be that honest, because they need to keep their appearance up.
And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.
Well, a few years ago I think I could have given you a more enthusiastic answer about that but in the last few years, for the first time in my life, I really haven't listened to much music. I used to work with music on and now I don't.
Now that I'm older, I like almost anything that's done well, even surf music and instrumentals; I really enjoyed the interviews with the Ventures in your magazine.
Music is an essential part of my life and I'm completely lost without a good album to listen to or my iPod in my pocket!
I think the industry is oblivious to the fact that most people listen to all kinds of stuff. I personally don't know of anyone who listens to only one genre of music. It's vanity because no one does.
What I want to do, is play music for somebody who believe in me.
My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.
I played music and sang from my earliest memories. The first pictures of me show me wandering around with a guitar that was larger than I was, and it became almost second nature to me.
I don't get in there and create a character. It's more of a voice that I hear living inside the music.
I want my music to jump off the stage and out of the speakers. When we do 'Rain Is A Good Thing' paired back to back with 'Country Girl,' it just feels like the roof is fixin' to come off the place.
