And it took me about 11 years to get a record deal, and I just had to work around and come to terms with the fact that what I was doing was going to be different, and I just had to wait until somebody was ready to jump on the bandwagon.
I feel like I am a celebrity for no reason, like people are resentful I didn't have to play bars for 10 years to get a record deal.
I don't think you need a record deal to write songs. You don't need any other reason than you want to do it. It's a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.
I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!
Some people choose to go on 'American Idol' or another singing contest, and some people choose to beat down barrooms before anyone even knows who they are, in order to get a fan base, so when they do get a record deal, they have that to put in front of a label.
Education was a given, only because of the way I was raised. Truth be told, I thought, at 15 years old, I should go and get a record deal and drop out of school, and my parents would have had none of that. I'm grateful now that my parents were pushing me in that way, because I wasn't mature enough on so many levels to do that.
As I grew older, I actually was prepared to go into fine arts school and do a degree. That was what I was actually settled upon when I was offered a record deal.
I never sought out a record deal. It caught me with my pants down. I was just a musician doing my thing, I didn't even send my records out.
Once I started looking for a record deal, I had a trainer. And the trainer told me that I would never sell a record if I didn't lose weight.
Way before we got a record deal, we were playing clubs seven nights a week, three one-hour sets a night. Then we got the record deal, and we took off on the road and stayed out.
I have to work really hard to get the record deal - I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.
I had to get out of my record deal that I signed with my previous band and get a full solo record deal going so, with all of the paperwork that, that entails it did take a while.
I always said, if I got a record deal, I'd want to record the best songs I could, whether I wrote them or not.
When I lost my record deal, and my phone wasn't ringing, I realized that I had to reassess who Vesta was and figure out what was going wrong. I knew it wasn't my singing ability. So it had to be that I was expendable because I didn't have the right look.
There isn't a single artist out there, I'm sure, who wouldn't take the most perfect record deal. If the right record deal came along, like, the perfect deal, we'd definitely take it.
It's a sense of pride, a sense of you set out to get a record deal, and we got that. We set out to get a No. 1 record, and then we got that. Then you say, 'Wow, that was impossible and now even more impossible is to stay No. 1 and stay current and put out new records that people care about,' and we really stuck to that.