I think music can heal your soul if you'll let it. It can also bring you up if you're down. It can also bring you down if you're too up. It's a mood thing.
'I don't want to grow up', Tom Waits said it. I live it. I put myself in a position to be a kid as long as I want to. I play loud music and scream for a living.
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.
When I was growing up, music was music and there were no genres. We didn't look at it as country music. Popular music in Tuskegee was country music. So I didn't know it in categories. It was the radio.
I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music.
I can read music, but I have no technique, and singing was never an option even though I sang a lot growing up.
I wanted my new release 'Get Back Up' to benefit Haiti in their tragedy and I am blessed to use my music to help as your purchase becomes our gift.
I still have a passion for the music, which is such a beautiful thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night out of a dream and have a melody in my head, and run to my piano.
You can't ignore reality. You won't wake up one morning and find that the Arabs of Umm al-Faham have become part of Palestine and are no longer in Israel.
I wake up every morning, look in the mirror and ask, 'Am I a sex symbol?' Then I go back to bed again. It's stupid to think that way.
It means I wake up to sunshine every morning, and I can afford to drink better wine at night. But I haven't completely sold out to Hollywood.
I wake up every morning literally with a smile on my face, grateful for another day I never thought I'd see.
If I'm on location on some island, we usually get up at four in the morning to set up. By seven thirty, we're on the beach working until noon, then we rest. It's not exactly a vacation.
Guys wake up at your place and they expect breakfast. They don't eat bagels and M&M's in the morning. They want things like toast. I say, 'I don't have these recipes.'
I actually play piano and violin, but I don't have a passion for it. It didn't make me wake up in the morning wanting to do it, or go to bed thinking about it.
When I wake up in the morning, I just can't get started until I've had that first, piping hot pot of coffee. Oh, I've tried other enemas.
I don't have to get up in the morning and go beat up my body like I used to. I don't have to be out there in August in 108 degree weather down in Texas.
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.
I was getting to bed about 10 P.M. so wound up and not getting to sleep by 11, and because I was putting the prosthetics on for five hours, I had to be up at 3 in the morning.
Hitchhiking was such a pure form of existence. You'd wake up in the morning, and you'd have no idea what your day was going to be. And that's something I've never been able to shake. I loved that.
I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons.
