We've always dreamt of a TV series and working in film. When we first sat down to seriously write 'A Little Nightmare Music,' to write something for TV was our original inspiration. But all the stuff we were writing down is not going to work on stage...
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a ...
To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early '90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you're looking a...
My first real foreign holiday was my honeymoon 20 years ago, and we went to Bali. It was particularly special for that reason, I enjoyed it very much - I had packed music scores and a practice drum pad, suspecting that I would be completely bored, bu...
I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 ...
From the first moment that I can remember, I had identified myself as a bass player and it had everything to do with my father, who was a bass player. And he loved music, you know, as much as anybody I've ever seen. And that dynamic I just thought as...
When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before; it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later: now she's an R&B singer.
It took us two years to get our first real gig. That was a big dream. We ended up booking a lot of our own gigs and putting on a lot of our own shows. We were trying to get our actual music across, trying to make a connection there.
There is a lot to say about what Bikini Kill and other 'riot grrrl' bands were able to achieve when they first set out. They were not some momentary, convulsive, creative spasm of independent music. There was a very real, relevant point of view being...
I had a portable 8-track player under all my ramps, cranking one of my four 8-tracks - Cars/'Candy-O,' Ramones/'Road To Ruin,' Cheap Trick/'Heaven Tonight' and the first Devo record. I don't remember skating without music.
My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am m...
I've always been a firm believer that soul music never dies. The artists we still listen to today, years after their music was first heard are mostly soul artists; Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan. We still sing along to all of them with our h...
Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.
Austin is a big music town, so growing up, I had a lot of local heroes. Toni Price I was very, very into; she was one of the first people I tried to emulate. She's a local Austin blues artist. Marsha Paul I was also a very big fan of.
If one wants to go on living, one must evolve. Before, when we composed, we would start by a series of music themes. Once created, we would hire writers and lyricists to make up the text and the story line. I was the first to do this backwards with '...
When I was first starting out in the music industry, I was always coupled in the same sentence with Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera - and I was probably the worst of them. I think a lot of people back then thought, 'Mandy Moore...
In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technical...
Well, I think the first piece of music I ever heard that I really loved was 'Salome's Dances' by Richard Strauss. I played that 12-inch, 78 record, and I stood up on an ottoman to play it on a big Victrola and I'd just keep playing it and playing it.
I wanted to be a cheerleader, like my sister was - all the most popular and beautiful girls are cheerleaders and I wanted that, and it demolished this vision of myself. That's when I found the piano, when music saved me; that's when I first attempted...
It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wide...
The Navy's paid for you to go through school, and then they need doctors to go out and take care of people who are in various different parts of the world. I decided to pay back my time first as an undersea medical officer. I was stationed in Scotlan...
