In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.
If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
I've always said that the experience of meeting an artist that you are in awe of and that you hope to create with one day is usually disappointing because you put them up on a pedestal, and then you're like, 'Wow, that's not a nice person.'
I've been a huge cricket fan since my teens, and I often used to go down to St. Helen's in Swansea in the summer. To me, it was like a 'rites of passage' experience to have the freedom of St. Helen's cricket ground.
It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube...
I don't like auditions. I feel like they're a very unnatural setting and it's a very unsettling experience. Because you can't help but walk in and feel like you're trying to prove yourself to people. And you should just walk in and be.
You can't dodge them all. I got hammered plenty of times through the years. But you just get up and keep playing. I can tell you from experience, though. Sometimes it hurts like hell.
It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people.
I think early on in my career, I was heavily inspired by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept, and films of David Lynch, for example, where the soundscape plays a very important role in the listening experience.
There's nothing that's in an actor's control. I've learned at this point you do things and you let them go. There's no way to control the outcome. The only thing I have any sort of reign over is my own experience.
What I remember about that experience is that if you went to go see ' Born On The Fourth Of July' and you happened to take a bathroom break real quick or grab some popcorn, you probably missed me. It was short, but it was memorable.
I had a brief experience in the food industry. I was a bus boy in a Mexican restaurant in Arizona, scraping re-fried beans off people's plates. It teaches you a bit of humility and the importance of a good deodorant.
I pay a bit more than lip-service to health: I don't eat chips or pre-prepared food, and it might be a comedy sacrilege to admit I do like vegetables, fruit and salad and stuff.
I'm learning to hunt with rifles, because if you think about it, hunting gets you the healthiest meat - organic, free-range food. It's a totally yuppie spin on what I thought was kind of a redneck occupation.
It's okay to talk about birth, okay - then menstruation. I first started my advocacy for women's health in the field of reproductive freedom, and the next stage would be bringing menopause out of the closet.
I could see that it was God's forgiveness and His mercy that I needed, and that was provided through Christ on the Cross for those who will receive Him as Lord and Savior. That is how I came to Christ.
I believe the Scriptures teach that there's a literal heaven and a literal hell, just like Jesus said. And without forgiveness of sins that, yeah, the place of punishment is called hell.
And you know, when you've experienced grace and you feel like you've been forgiven, you're a lot more forgiving of other people. You're a lot more gracious to others.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
I believe that fitness needs to come from within you. You need to respect your body. Only then will you have the zeal to maintain it. For me, keeping fit is a part of my lifestyle.
The main thing is that it's nice to see these young people - 9 to 14 years old - take the opportunity to get more involved in their health and fitness. We need more kids to be more active.
