I am quite short, but that never comes across when I'm onstage in front of people. When I get offstage and greet an audience afterwards, their first reaction is to comment on my height because it seems like a very drastic difference.
I've mainly been sampling jazz because the tone of the chords are expressive in itself, so it's quite nice to write over. It's got interpretations of a lot of different genres, too, a lot of dubby-ness and experimental stuff.
Lee Ann Womack is from near where I grew up in East Texas, so I've always looked up to her. I sang a lot of Dolly Parton as a kid and a lot of traditional western swing, like Patsy Cline and Roy Rogers.
You're a professional. You don't need for me to break a film down for you. If you want to stop the guy you're playing, they pay you millions of dollars. You get you a TV and break the player down yourself.
Look at this, scabs and cuts all over me, I get these every night, every game. They can't tell you that you're not at risk, and you can't tell me there's one guy in the N.B.A. who hasn't thought about it.
I've come to understand my role. On some level, I provide the context for them to shine. I also know my role is the steward of the songs, and the center point, the artist that the stuff all revolves around. But I really try to honor that.
If you're a kid, it's all you think about if you stutter. Kids can be so mean. My grades suffered. Class participation weighs heavy in grading, and I wouldn't open my mouth to read or talk in front of anyone.
I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.
But my role is to just apply the skills I've learned over the years: you listen to the guitar, you listen to the vocal melodies, you listen to the rhythm, and you come up with something that helps you take the song somewhere.
I wish I was your favorite girl, I wish you thought I was the reason you are in the world, I wish I was your favorite smile, I wish the way I dressed was your favorite kind of style
I feel like every five to seven years I really need to put myself in this position of discomfort and exploration, just to survive. Otherwise I feel like I'm falling asleep, like I'll go crazy if I don't do it.
You see a lot of European influence coming in with bigger guys having a larger skill set, shoot the ball, handle the ball, pass the ball. I'm hoping that'll develop into something I can do.
There was no person, whether they thought I was too fat, too black, too country, too ghetto, too New York, too thug or too whatever! Nobody ultimately had the say over whether or not I was going to make it.
I signal with an independent label, Continuum. After that I put out a totally independent record, sold fourteen thousand of them from my basement, bought a house, started raising my kid, made a decent living.
Like, you can't tell a certain race, like, 'You're supposed to act this way, and you're not supposed to act this way because of what color you are,' like, that's just holding everybody back, you know what I'm saying?
I've always been loud and obnoxious and sneaking my way into things, and so I feel like I've snuck my way onto the Lollapalooza lineup, and I'm going to sneak my way into whatever else I get to do.
I loved the bootcamp and the training. It was the actual Navy and the structure after it that I realized wasn't for me because they're building soldiers. It's a system, and you can't really stick out; you can't be the oddball out in the military.
I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas, and he would play the blues.
My friends ask me what it's like moving from Vermont to L.A., but no matter where I am, I pretty much just end up sitting in coffee shops, thinking about songs.
Red carpets are pretty unpredictable. You can go from one person asking you what you're wearing to the next person asking you about the situation in Haiti. It's the extreme juxtaposition, and some of the questions can throw me!
I ain't here to argue about his facial features. Or here to convert atheists into believers. I'm just trying to say the way school need teachers the way Kathie Lee needed Regis that's the way yall need Jesus.
