I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn't say in real life.
I learned from a longtime farmer that pigs enjoy soothing music.
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.
There's definitely an interest in Scotland and what happened here. I think the rest of the world are fascinated by our history, and it's nice to be able to bring Scotland and our culture and music to the screen.
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
I can't watch shows like 'The X Factor,' for instance. I just squirm for the people involved, for the way they're being used. It's the cruellest, most ridiculous show on television. It's ruined music, ruined everything.
All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?
Well, first of all, they're all about the music and all I care about in my professional career is the music.
I was a pop freak. I love music. Of course, I knew soul because I grew up in it. Writing it and everything. I love soul. But I love a tune that has some meat in it. Something I could hang my hat on. Because music is universal. Therefore, I felt no boundaries.
To me, music is entertainment - what else can it be? In fact, it's the only language I know of that's universal.
I've had the privilege of meeting and/or interviewing most of the top metal and hard rock artists at various points in my career and sharing their stories and music with millions of fans on air through TV and radio.
I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.
This is how much of a music geek I am: if I have a day with nothing to do, one of my favourite things is to just sit at my computer and make playlists of pretty much anything.
I honed in on a great time, the Motown era, the '60s and '70s. That type of music has always been a staple in my life.
You bring to chess facets of your personality and what you are. I have interests other than chess, like music and world and current affairs. I also have many friends around the world with whom I like to keep in touch.
Music is the medium that has taken me around the world, and I would be lying if I said I could live without music.
The relationship between art and a job is not quite linear, but I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid.
If I'm not on tour or in the studio, I'm in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. Playing music has afforded me that. It's not lost on me that it's a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature.
I went to performing arts camp, secretly taking classes - I got the lead in the musical, and my dad was like, 'Wait, I thought you were going here for music and knitting'.
My favorite workouts are the ones that don't feel like I'm working out! So, dance is a big one. Another is any kind of isolated moves, like ballet moves. Anything that works the glutes and legs - sign me up! And I like to blast the music. I have to get lost in the music. That helps.
Punk's influence on music, movies, art, design and fashion is no longer in doubt. It is used as the measurement for what is cool.
I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.
I want to remind people that there is no soundtrack in 'Southland;' there is no scored music or soundtrack telling you what you're supposed to feel.
I want to produce the music to a movie that I'm working on, like what Prince did with 'Purple Rain.'
But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.
There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
You either have fans who stick with you, or they don't. It comes down to making music that people connect with and great fans.
Before I was working professionally, I would do YouTube covers. But as a creative person, it was really hard for me when I wasn't releasing my own music. That felt unnatural to me.
I don't find imitating other people's music easy at all. I remember being fifth in line for a Rolling Stones tour, early '90s, when Bill Wyman left, and I was hoping against hope that I wouldn't get the call to audition. I wouldn't be able to play a Stones song if you put a gun to my head.
My teacher, Josef Gingold, a student of the French school, always loved the music of Saint-Saens and Henri Vieuxtemps and all the French repertoire.
My parents were part of a crowd that was attached to all the different navies stationed in Malta. When they would have parties in each other's houses, I would get taken along, and that's where I heard all this great music. I didn't distinguish particular styles; it was all music to me.
Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.
I wanna make my imprint in the game as far as music - hip-hop, and just music, period. 'Cause I come from hip-hop, that's my background, but I'm not gonna let that limit me from where I can go.
I invite a lot of my friends to some of the performances that I do locally, and some of them know that I'm involved with music, but they're not quite sure how. And so it's kind of fun to play golf with a lot of my friends and then invite them to hear me sing once in a while.
I seem to be very attracted to strong female personalities in acting and music.
