What most people know about me, they know through my music. This time, I've tried to open that door as wide as possible. These songs are a giant step closer to who I really am and what my music is all about. Hence the title.
It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.
Surf music is played through a Showman amp with a Stratocaster guitar.
I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good!
It's a really diverse time in music, with all these different DJs and all these different categories, and we are all taking footnotes from everyone else. There are no real genre boundaries anymore; you can take a trance idea and put it into a trap record - it's not that uncommon.
Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat.
If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.
Coming to Nashville has been so motivating and inspirational. Just watching people live and breathe their music and create something that they can feel from start to finish.
Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.
They've been brought up on the best music. It's gonna be so good.
Music is supposed to be inspired.
It's striking and unique in London how you know to create this alchemy between the concept, the food, the music, the staff. From the beginning to the end, with all these different elements, it tells a full story that you know very well how to develop and cultivate.
I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music.
Life got very good - we went from living in a one-bedroom apartment to a five-bedroom mansion by the time I was in high school. I had everything I wanted growing up, though all I wanted was music stuff - drums, a PC, turntables.
Dick Clark's 'American Bandstand' spread the gospel of American pop music and teenage style that transcended the regional boundaries of our country and united a youth culture that eventually spread its message throughout the entire world.
My faith plays a big part in who I am: a Christian guy playing pop-rock music. I'm in a pop-rock band, not a Christian band.
I'm making a record that's half stripped down acoustic which is the way I perform a lot and half of it is very produced. It's really hard to keep music simple but I was trying to keep it simple and focus on one or two instruments and vocals.
The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.
I don't have an iPod. I don't get the whole iPod thing. Who has time to listen to that much music? If I had one, it would probably have Sinatra, Beatles, some '70s music, some '80s music, and that's it.
I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.
Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music.
On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.
I love hip hop music and would do anything to help the culture blow up in China because it's been so underground. I just want people know how good this culture is, how good the music is, and how it can change your life.
My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it through my music. If you can live it, there's no problem about the music, because it's part of the whole thing.
I actually went to drama school at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in Glasgow, so I stayed in my home town the whole time. However, I see more of my friends now than I did then. It's strange.
In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.
Things can turn ugly so quickly in the music business, especially if you have an unexpected success.
I agree with you about the music of today. It lacks style and emotion.
Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
God had to create disco music so I could be born and be successful.
Being authentic can be a good thing in that often people who are fixated on that are also fixated on having very high standards, so they may maintain something they think has tremendous value. On the other hand, most of the kinds of music that I've been excited about are hybrid in their origins.
I'd love to do my own music for sure. I'd love to have a band.
We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.
If I'm going on any trip, driving music is key. Road Hammers is good driving music. I don't mind listening to my own stuff. You record it for a certain reason. You fall in a love with a certain song at a certain time and how you record it is a labour of love. You better love it.
So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.
