Now is now, and I live everything one day at a time. The fact that I'm still on the planet and able to still make music is such a miracle.
For a long time, I was shy about recording gospel music, because I didn't necessarily want to show the inside of my soul, Milsap revealed. But now, the spiritual side of me is really shining through.
My music has a high irritation factor. I've always tried to say something. Eccentric lyrics about eccentric people. Often it was a joke. But I would plead guilty on the grounds that I prefer eccentricity to the bland.
I do like to be creative and I'm very lucky that I've been given different areas in which I'm able to do that - whether it be film or television or theatre or whatever. I'm also still into music and recording.
Without my music, no doors would have opened, so I am forever grateful, and I am always going to be singing. But yeah, when the other doors open, why not walk through?
You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.
I asked Bob Dylan to paint the album cover for 'Music from Big Pink.' He said, 'Yeah, let me see what I can come up with.'
Chuck Berry told me if it wasn't for Louis Jordan, he wouldn't have probably ever even got into music. That Louis Jordan changed everything and made him want to become a musician.
A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You're constantly adjusting. It's like a piece of music. You're constantly trying to make it better.
In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.
Because I gave myself - I left school after the second semester of my junior year to pursue a career in music. and I gave myself five years to make it and I made it in three.
To play music, you have to understand it. I didn't understand 'Topographic Oceans.' That's why I hardly played on it. It frustrated me no end - and playing the whole thing on tour, I got farther and farther away from it.
I'm still looking for the rules of what is and isn't pop music. I'm pop. I mean, of course I am. What isn't pop? There should be a pop amnesty where everyone reclaims it.
I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame.
Canada does a really a phenomenal job of producing music, actors, and entertainers. If you look at the number of people we have in our country relative to the number of people that are prominent in the entertainment industry, it's pretty impressive.
Find people who think like you and stick with them. Make only music you are passionate about. Work only with people you like and trust. Don't sign anything.
Music really gets me going, so I've always got to make sure I have my iPod to give me energy to work out.
The music industry over there seems to treat America like it's one territory even though they got offices in different parts of America - they're still quite sort of 'America is the territory.'
I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other - that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again.
My genre of music is very eclectic. I might play some Latin jazz, or just go into a spontaneous jazz thing. That's the thing about coming to one of my performances. Not every show is the same.
You've got to go down the road you naturally go down, and for me it was pop, folk country, just feel-good music. I suppose most of my songs are very up-tempo.
