Nirvana was pop. You can have distorted guitars and people say it's alternative, but you can't break out of pop music's constructs and still get extensive radio play and media coverage.
Certain kinds of people will always have an issue with my music. But that's fine; it's OK. I don't want to be the McDonald's of music. I don't want to not turn anyone off. If you were everybody's cup of tea, you'd probably be boring.
I started playing guitar, like, when I was 17 or so, but where I'm from, you just don't hear about people moving to Nashville and making it. It was such a foreign thing to me. I never knew music was an option for me.
I like to make music, I like rap music. Even if I'm white, I support that music. If I want to support it or any other white kid wants to support it more power to them.
With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly their physical appearance. With female musicians, that's made a big thing of, and I think people, certainly with me, have appreciated a bit of mystery.
I'm a serious student of music, a perfectionist in the studio, and I take the arrangement and production of it very seriously, down to the mixing and mastering even. But at the same time I'm having so much fun with it. I try not to take myself so ser...
I was always into music. And none of my friends were really into music the same way I was. So it was just different. It was really not very well understood by most of my friends. They didn't tease me about it - they just didn't really relate.
My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York, and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by.
I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scen...
People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.
The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.
I like listening to old soul music. I like Sam Cooke. When I was growing up, the first things I was listening to was Whitney Houston and Cher. They were really big inspirations for me.
I really was kind of like a musical nerd. I would watch VH1's 'Behind The Music.' That was heavy when I was a kid. I would sit up and want to watch that all day instead of going outside sometimes.
You can see it on the Internet: There's an argument going on continually about, 'What is folk music?' And I don't really want to get involved in that. It's an endless argument, a 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' kind of argument.
When The Byrds started country-rock, we had no idea there would be such a thing. We were just trying to honor the music. We started listening to country radio. We went to Nudie's and got cowboy clothes.
It was very satisfying knowing I could come in not really knowing what I was going to do, and at the end of the session feeling that I'd really done interesting guitar work and knowing that I'd really contributed to the music.
My mother told me when I was a toddler and in the crib that they would have music playing, and the thing when I lit up was boogie-woogie or something out of the Louie Jordan period of sometimes big bands, and then all kinds of things.
Maybe you're going to a concert thinking you're not going to hear anything but music. But you may walk away from there with an answer to a problem that you're carrying around with you that you didn't think you were going to hear about.
Cranking the Auto-Tune is so easy to do that there's almost no systemic resistance to trying it. So when someone's stuck for an idea, that's what they do. I mean, to the extent that it's been embraced by an entire idiom of club music and culture.
If something doesn't work, you have to admit it. Always try to find what's going right and what's going wrong with your music. If you can, pool your resources and record yourself; do that frequently.
As I was sitting there, the deejay was playing music and talking over the music, and the kids were going crazy. All of a sudden, something said to me, 'Put something like that on a record, and it will be the biggest thing.' I didn't even know you cal...