I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room service.
The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick.
You can't exactly do it from your hotel room. It's the weather; you've got to get out in it. You're telling people that there are 70 mile-per-hour winds. So it's like, 'Let's prove it.'
They can't take your house and give it to the mayor's mistress, even if they pay you for it. But they can, apparently, take your house and tear it down to make room for a development of trendy shops and restaurants, a hotel and so on.
I don't have a crazy rider clause saying I have to stay at fancy hotels. I don't have a problem with staying at a Marriott. But I will admit that I've gotten just basic, regular service there.
We found that our kids enjoy those simple adventures we take as a family. I'm driving, my wife's the copilot and we give one kid a choice of what they want to go do. We eat a lot of bad food and sleep in some interesting hotels.
All my jobs have been with food in one way or another since 1948. My parents were in the hotel business, and I just loved the warm hearted people who worked so hard with such good humor.
People always think women meet us in the hotel lobby, but it's the opposite. The majority of the time, you go out to eat with your teammates, then rest for the next day's game. It's not a vacation - most guys view the road as a business trip.
The band would play on the night off for the local hotel bands and we'd back all the different acts. So I'd been advised by good friends of mine to come back to Hawaii. Oh, I loved Honolulu, playing at a place right on the beach at Waikiki!
My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We're professionals. That's what we do. I don't give a damn about the short-term market implications.
All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotels rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology, and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the futur...
Today there are paparazzi out, I'm doing a day of press, I'm in a hotel, I've just been on Radio 1. But when I'm in my day-to-day life people don't know who I am and I'm left to my own devices.
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.
But I try not to become preoccupied with that because with whatever direction I follow, with whatever advice I've followed or not followed, It's landed me in New York, in a very beautiful hotel, talking to people about something that I love. So I ain...
I get my most creative sort of energy after a show. So I love to go back to the hotel and compose new material. Generally in a rush, exactly. I have to get it out somehow, otherwise I can't sleep, you know.
To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.
I have legendary massive breakfasts at hotels. I don't hold back. I'll get there at 7A.M. and I'll be the last out at 11 A.M., having gone up and down the buffet seven times.
My first press tour for 'Vikings' was pretty overwhelming. Between all the hotels, TV shows and talking a lot, I would get done and have to sit in silence for a while. It was exhausting, and you really have to focus.
The road, lyric-wise, is a trap, and a bore. Maybe it's interesting to me, but I don't think it's a connecting thing with other humans. What is there to write about? Truck stops, hotels, clubs?
I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.
For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.
