My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that's my stock. That's how I want my kid...
I'd been DJ-ing in these clubs in N.Y. and I hated everything that was coming out. So I decided I would make it myself. People were making mash-ups or remixes, but I was extra bored, so I actually started remaking these records from scratch.
My mother carried me for 10 months. I asked her 'Mother, you had an extra month, why you didn't make me a beautiful face?' and mother told me, 'My son, I was busy making your beautiful hands and heart.'
These tears I'm wailing, I spill not without reason. Remove them, my dearest love. Take me to the place I've been dreaming of, where the grotesquely lonely meet the grotesquely lonely and they whisper, just very softly, Please be mine, Dearest Love.
There's a club, if you'd like to go You could meet somebody who really loves you.' So you go, and you stand on your own And you leave on your own And you go home, and you cry And you want to die.
One thing I don't personally like is not having that privacy I used to have. Being able to do whatever I wanted to do without people recognizing me. That makes me watch what I'm doing more carefully. I'm not going to be acting no fool.
He wanted to play accordion on something of mine and I said you can play accordion, but I want you to play piano and organ on some stuff. He came over a couple times a week for two weeks and gave me therapy as to whether I should do The Thorns or not...
We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.
As a kid, I was really into performing. I would do choruses, I would do musicals, whatever it was. And then, as a teenager, I got into an acting class at SUNY Purchase for gifted kids, and that really turned me on to material beyond musicals, Sam She...
I don't read books. I read 'On the Road' in high school, and that was awesome, so I guess that's my favorite book. 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' even though I didn't read it, that's the greatest story. SparkNotes came in when I was in high school, and tha...
When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'
I wanted to be heard myself, which is hard in a household of people who were very showy. It forced me to find myself and define a personality and a way of being different, and that's a thing that's going to help me to survive in a world of many peopl...
I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.
When I was 14 years old, I was with my parents at a restaurant. Some people came in and said, 'Would you like to be a model?' I went to see them, and they said, 'You have to lose seven kilos.' I said, 'No, I want to eat French fries.'
What I like about gyrotonics is you feel like you really elongated yourself for the day... As we all get older, everything changes and moves, and there's natural ways to exercise. I think it's important, and I think it's something that can help keep ...
I don't know anybody who doesn't hate being called alt.country. It just sounds like a website. I don't mind being called Americana, I don't mind being called country noir, or independent country is fine, but the words alt.country make me insane.
I found my place when I moved to London, where I chose to live, making my own tribe who were all from different backgrounds and places. The class thing is very dominant there, but in the cultural cross-fertilization, I felt a sense of belonging.
At some point you start seeing the difference between what you really want, and what is your priority order. I feel that today I know what I want. That's the problem with perspective, as well as focus and concentration.
When I'm singing 'Deanna,' for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.
Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all tha...
I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern...
