When I was in high school, my thing was to get as close as humanly possible to a girl and just make her have to kiss me! You do the hug that's too close, where your mouth is close to hers and you kinda feel it out a little bit.
When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.
I'm flattered that so many baseball people think I'm a Hall of Famer. But what's hard to believe is how one-hundred and fifty plus people have changed their minds about me since I became eligible, because I haven't had a base hit since then.
On 'Heartbreaker,' I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs. With 'Gold,' I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.
So you had to rev your engines, to beat the Russians and I think more than anything, if the Soviet team would win, or the Soviet athletes would win, you would see and hear and read about that. Quite frequently. So they would make a big issue of it.
I look on most religions as fear-based rather than love-based. I've drifted away from all that. Yes, I think I'm more spiritual. I just don't go and pretend every Saturday or Sunday that I'm in this wonderful club. I'm exploring.
People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what's so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he ju...
The guitar is such an incredible instrument; it plays classical, flamenco, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, acid, blues. You'll never see a clarinet playing Black Sabbath. But you will see a guitar in a clarinet band playing rhythm. It is the most pop...
When you're 17 and you have an idea, people don't really listen to you. I came out of an environment where my parents were always pushing me to do what I wanted and be creative, and I was not used to the industry's way of thinking.
Mama was a country woman with a whole lot of common sense. She understood what most of our neighbors didn't - that I shouldn't grow dependent on anyone except myself. 'One of these days, I ain't gonna be here,' she kept hammering inside my head.
I'd been listening to some old '70s disco, soul stuff, and I thought, 'Let's go into the studio and do something different. Let's do something that's super unashamedly pop and fun and danceable.' 'Trouble' is what we did. It's something that wrote it...
I was kind of known as a ballad singer. People would send ballads. Some of them would go over my shoulder and float off the top of my head, and I just didn't feel anything. Then I would hear a song that would absolutely shake me.
We draft mostly high school kids and we have one of the finest, if not the finest, player development programs and coaching staffs and we teach our players the right way to play. We also have a game plan in scouting, and there are certain types of pl...
I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.
What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the ...
I pay less attention to my hair then probably anybody that I know. I get out of the shower, I towel dry it. I, like, blow it off and then I just run my hands through it and away we go. It's just what it is.
I think being a mum gives you extra qualities. I'm more feisty, fiercely protective and less selfish. The main trait I want to instill in my kids is kindness. I think it's the most important thing. If you're kind, you'll go a long way.
Growing up, we didn't have anything. My mum wasn't well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post.
Some of my first teachers were incredibly tough. You could never sing more than three words without being stopped and having to do it over 20 times. I loved that - that sort of process of dissecting and trying to figure out and master this incredibly...
Sometimes people think it's what you say when you're in a huge group that makes you a leader. But sometimes it's the one-on-one conversations you have with guys individually, just getting to know them. I think I've done that a lot. Not intentionally ...
