Wyclef is a musician that tried to unite as many musicians at once as possible. I am trying to be successful at that. The greatest challenge is that, I just got arrested for protesting in NYC for cutting the school budgets... And I think that it's im...
What I learned from people like Carlos Santana is that you cannot get too happy after working for five years in the industry. It takes years and years, and I learned to keep a straight head and keep on working harder and harder.
'House of Balloons' was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.
There's always the cliche of the choir shouting and clapping. OK, you have to do that, but there's also introspective parts, parts where you just follow someone that's preaching. There's lots of different emotions and moods that a service requires.
Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!
Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actual...
My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it's memorable... If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there's really not much point in you having been there - or me, for that matt...
I'm not likely to forget where I've been and what I've done and learned. I think it's just as important to play new instruments as to play new pieces. The old ones are getting scarcer and the new ones more and more wonderful.
The largest newspaper in the United States is only reaching 1 percent of population. We are kind of assuming that 'Wall Street Journal,' 'USA Today,' and other newspapers are very important. Yes, they're extremely important, but only to 1 percent of ...
If someone has failed, that is not a deficiency for me. I think that he has more motivation. I've seen many examples where someone was successful first and failed later and failed first and then succeeded. If they failed in an honest way, I don't see...
I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctu...
I don't like to do things for any other reason than it happens spontaneously or there's something that makes it happen naturally. I don't like putting down too many plans and trying to do a strategy to get a certain response or a certain effect.
Governor Jan Brewer and the Arizona legislature have created an environment in Arizona where performing is no longer a neutral act. They have created an environment where they can convert the normal commercial interaction between artists and their fa...
You listen to Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio in it, and it's not Black Sabbath. They should have just called it 'Heaven and Hell' right from the beginning. Because you listen to that 'Heaven and Hell' album, that doesn't sound anything close to ...
It gave me a lot of pleasure and pride that 90 percent of the crew for 'Monsoon Wedding,' and most of my film, are women. We get the work done, you know, much lesser play of ego... And I really believe in harmony, I believe in working in a spirit of ...
I wanted to move away from Holland for my work because I felt that things would be better for me in England. But when I heard Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures', that pushed me towards making the move and making it real. I met them within 12 days of ...
I have a certain way of thinking where I see something, and I know that I want it and I make up my mind - and that's pretty much all there is to it. It was like, This is what I want to do, and I'm going, and everything's going to work out. I'm going ...
Skinny jeans are usually my go to jean. I do bootleg every once in a while, boyfriend jeans I feel like are so hard to pull off! Skinny jeans are very easy and you can kind of pair anything with them and it will work: heels and boots or nice top or f...
Auditioning and actually acting on a set are two different things. When you audition, you're in a room and you don't have anything to play with and you don't have anything physically in the room. Whereas on set, you have direction, you have costumes,...
I stay away from straight bench; all the work I do is with dumbbells to protect my rotator cuffs. Then I'll do a bunch of different pull moves like inverted rows before finishing with some simple internal or external rotations with a band to strength...
'Clybourne Park' was my first job after the birth of my son, who was 11 weeks old when we started rehearsals. And while that was truly harder than anything I've ever done, I was grateful every day to be going to work on such an incredible play, with ...