I'd like to say that I'm a rock star, but I'm not - I'm honestly more of a relationship kind of guy. I'm a guy you could take home to meet your mum rather than a guy your mum wouldn't like.
After I left the Pumpkins, I went home and just sat around. I have a studio in my basement, and I found myself writing all these songs, just taking advantage of the relaxed situation. I wrote about 30 songs in about 30 days.
What really helps me is being able to record my albums at home - I have more fun experimenting that way, as opposed to working with an engineer, in which case I have to deal with the humiliation of doing take after take, and that can get frustrating.
My first record was made in Termonfeckin, which is a small town on the north-east coast of Ireland. I had been in London, but it didn't click. So, at home, I didn't think about making something, just whether something could be made. There was no gran...
Sometimes I can't think of a better way to end my day than coming home and just strumming my ukulele for a few minutes. I mean, I joke around and tell people that it's an entire yoga session in one strum, you know?
When I'm up on stage, I'm thinking more about my fans and about myself as a singer and an artist. When I'm at home being a daddy, the last thing I'm thinking about is being an artist. It is two things that I never really put together.
So it helped me to just let go of all my tensions and feelings about that world and say 'OK, this is for my fans in Japan. They'll be nice and get into it and have fun.' And it was the first record I made at my home studio.
I started at home as a kid putting on shows and lip-syncing Michael Jackson for the grown-ups. Then, in musicals and plays in school. At 17, I was performing in coffee shops and in parking lots at Phish shows. At 18, I had a band that played local sh...
I remember the '70s constantly being winter in Manchester and the Irish community in Manchester closing ranks because of the IRA bombings in Birmingham and Manchester, and you know the bin-workers' strike, all wrapped up in it... They were violent ti...
I think when you're a TV presenter, you have to have a reason for doing it ,and a lot of them have been around a long time and grafted for that. The reason why it works with me on 'The Xtra Factor' is because I was a contestant on it, and I have a re...
My wife and I had decided not to let anybody take pictures of our home because it was just the last place on earth we had that was unscathed. But people have climbed over the fence; they've taken aerial shots. They've gotten my address and put it on ...
Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.
There are two things that give me perfect happiness - doing the perfect shot and travelling. I get stressed, really stressed by the fact that there is just so much to see and I am not going to live long enough to visit all the places I want to.
I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing comp...
Trust your own instincts, go inside, follow your heart. Right from the start. go ahead and stand up for what you believe in. As I've learned, that's the path to happiness.
It's such an obedient way to be for a woman, to try to keep yourself in top shape, to follow all the rules and hope that will get you a measure of stability or happiness. That's part of the affluent suburban dream: to do everything perfectly in a lon...
We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar p...
There are two 'Snow White' movies coming out for the same reason that you remember back in the day there was 'Armageddon' and then 'Deep Impact.' You know, 'Andromeda Strain' and then 'Outbreak.' Like, all of those things. It's common because basical...
I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it's science fiction, horror or really anything. I'm just drawn to quality. I don't think 'Darkness Falls' is horror; there isn't any gore by any stretch of the imagi...
I've got quite a vivid imagination and I'm easily overwhelmed by sensations and things that are beautiful or scary. I don't think I've ever seen a ghost - I think I'm probably haunted by my own ghosts than real ones.
I'm essentially the result of other people's imagination. And that's fine. Because of other people's imagination, I've played parts I would never have thought I could do. Still, I've never had a hankering or an ambition for any particular role.
