I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.
I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.
I think I really scored with my parents. All of my friends pretty much came from broken homes, and my parents are still together, but not only that, they're still in love and still write together.
I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.
Drawing and visual pursuits were first. Music came and found me in a way. Really, what it's about is creative problem solving, and music is a lot more an expression of that than painting is for me.
When I was 14, I came very close to becoming a gay teen suicide 'statistic,' but I then turned to music, my piano, my loved ones, and discovered that it does in fact get better.
Miles Davis turned his back to the audience when he came out on stage, and he offended people. But, he wasn't there to entertain; he was all about the music. I kind of do that.
It's interesting, as I said on the last tour in America, the audience actually came out, they had to have been the kind of fans who listened to my music via their parents, you know what I mean?
From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.
I studied voice when I was at school, and I was in the chamber choir, and I studied music theory as well, so I guess a lot of it came from being taught at school.
When I first came to Nashville, people hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels, and we ate when we could.
Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brou...
I came up playing in both punk rock bands and hip-hop bands, and I found a more universal way of reaching people, especially with music that has a message to it.
It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped.
I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.
I've been chasing my music dream for a very long time and the acting dream just came up. But there are musical things I want to show the world, so that's my next step.
When I came here it wasn't that I was anti-Music Row, but it was like I was going against the grain of what everybody on Music Row was doing, and that's what has made me successful.
I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.
In our own state, we came up with, I think, what was a very novel approach to closing the gap on the uninsured. To harmonize medical records - which was a major step in getting costs out of the system.
We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.
You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.
