Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.
My goal has always been to make classic records, classic albums. Sometimes the recording process and the era it was recorded in means the production leans in a particular way, but to me they are all part of the same process.
Then on to all the terrific american songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. Whoever wrote and sang in the song form I have appreciated.
Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad 'Joey,' Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.
A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
With sincere modesty, if there is such a thing, I have never thought of legacy at all. I am always grateful if people like what I have done. A legacy is something no one can forsee.
I know for my wife and I, we always loved the idea of being young parents. It is an incredibly inspiring and challenging job being a parent, and as it turns out, being young really helps you keep up.
I've always said I can't tell sometimes that people even have an album out until I see them nominated for a Grammy. I think country gets dumped on across the board by the Grammys.
Well, I couldn't do the day-to-day stuff of being a politician or anything, but I just think everybody should have an opinion and everybody should vote, and that's what we're built on.
We try to buy as much American-made shirts as we can and stuff to sell. It's very difficult to cover every base as much as our country has been saturated with foreign products.
I actually feel like the phrase 'big in Japan' is not appropriate for me. The reason is that there are more people who sympathize with my practice in America than there are domestically in Japan.
I was thinking about how a playlist is really so inadequate as opposed to a mixtape because it takes seventeen days to really make a mixtape with a homemade cover that you like and that you'd give away.
When I'm hiring someone I look for magic and a spark. Little things that intuitively give me a gut feeling that this person will go to the ends of the earth to accomplish the task at hand.
There are no more heroes in America. Because of the Internet, heroism has become momentary and within seconds someone who we should be thinking about will be replaced in people's minds with news that Beyonce lip-synched at the inauguration.
Where you have the most armed citizens in America, you have the lowest violent crime rate. Where you have the worst gun control, you have the highest crime rate.
It was psychobabbler Abraham Maslow who wrote of the phenomena of self-actualization. What Maslow failed to grasp is that reaching true self-actualization can only be ultimately achieved when you have your own brand of ammunition.
I think you should ride the line between fatigue and chaos. The chaos keeps the energy level and spontaneity maximized, while fatigue is just over the edge, and you should try to avoid it.
I don't wanna be a rock star. I don't believe in rock stars. If you really examine what goes with being a rock star, I've avoided that really well.
Everyone in England knows about Burberry, and it kind of represents a standard of being well-dressed... But the nice thing is, they have a lot of clothes, so I still feel like myself whenever I'm wearing their clothes.
My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.
I don't think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.