Sometimes I'll turn the channel and there's the movie and I can honestly say that those last few minutes always fascinate me. It's one of the rare instances when image, music, and drama work effectively.
There was a time when I was fighting with the decision as to whether or not a Hasidic man could go out and have a music career in the world and be involved in pop culture. For me, I was able to bring those two things together for quite some time.
I did some acting in college. But then everything stopped when I was a junior, in the fall of 2001, when I started becoming religious. Once I became a full-on Hasidic, I stopped everything. I stopped music. I stopped acting.
I have been tied up with music for about as long as I can remember. By the time I was four I was picking out little tunes my mother played on the reed organ in the living-room.
There's a certain groove you pick that makes the music flow, and when you have it it's in your pocket. It's the feeling behind the rhythm... to me, the hardest thing to strive for is that feeling, behind the groove.
The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.
Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
I think it has been a weird mistake to have people with their own music careers going on and judging people because when they're too critical, it affects them. They don't want to be that honest, because they need to keep their appearance up.
Nobody was listening when I learned how to play music. But there's something about being on stage, talking to the audience, looking at them and smiling, that's always been difficult for me. I'm a lot more comfortable now, but there are still moments ...
It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.
I have been playing acoustic music for a very long time, and it's something that I am very comfortable doing, so if I made a record, it would probably be a mixture of that and some other things that I'm interested in.
I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.
I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful r...
I have created hours upon hours of different music over the years that the general public has never heard. Maybe one day I'll release them all in one big package, but we'll see.
If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.
I use the NordicTrack every other day for 20 minutes. I don't listen to music or watch TV while I do it. I count to myself. I count to 25; I count to 25 backwards, that sort of thing.
The '60s weren't my cup of tea. I never bought that philosophy that, you know, we're all brothers and that'll solve everything. And I never believed that music dictated the times. I always thought it reflected them.
I mean, my music career and my acting career - if I want to do them to the extent that I eventually do want to get to, it's going to be a bit of a balancing act. But I'm hoping they'll just go hand in hand.
If I had grown up in any place but New Orleans, I don't think my career would have taken off. I wouldn't have heard the music that was around this town. There was so much going on when I was a kid.
I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.
I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.
