If I'm not on tour or in the studio, I'm in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. Playing music has afforded me that. It's not lost on me that it's a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature.
I feel with ELP that I wasn't making the most of my life and I wasn't making the most of my creativity. I was marking time. I don't want to do that. Life is to short.
The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.
I was born and trained to communicate music, just as the sons were born and trained to hunt, and I was lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music-that has a passionate belief in the power of music as a celebration of l...
Minor Threat was an important band, believe me that it was important it in my life, but it belongs to an era that no longer exists. I'm not nostalgic. I think music today is much more important, because something can be done about it.
In some ways, I always thought you're better off behaving like a rock star when you're a normal person. Because if you do it as a rock star, you'll end up in the papers and your life will be made a misery.
I would say a lot of the emotion in what I do is a sort of a thankfulness for those energies being around, because there's been points in my life when they weren't around, and it's a real sort of miserable existence.
Parents talk a lot about how much strength and dedication it takes to raise a child. I think it also takes a lot of strength and dedication to carve out a life that doesn't seem normal to anyone else.
It's easier to write from my own life, and it's also more fun. I always write about relationships, for instance, whether they're romantic relationships, friendships, encounters... there's always a lesson to be learned from them.
For my whole career, I've been a singer-slash-songwriter, even though I'm very thankfully known for my voice. Songwriting has always been a joy in my life, and to be recognized for it is extremely validating.
'Pride' is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I've come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.
You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.
When I left HEEP I didn't know what I wanted! It took me a long time to adjust to life away from the band and the only thing I knew was that I didn't want to repeat my mistakes!
I had been playing since I was 2 years old, never remembering a life without music, always playing everything naturally and mostly by ear, and all the grownups wanted were more scales and drudgery out of me.
I'm Jewish and respect the traditions of Judaism, but through all the time I've spent photographing nature, I also have a deep appreciation for the power of the universe. No, not the power of the universe, but just celebrating life.
The most spiritual place you can be in your life is when you're being very real, when you're not allowing everybody and everything to influence your decisions and your moods, and what's morally right or ethically right.
I don't think of them as teenage songs. The things that happen to you in high school are the same things that happen your entire life. You can fall in love at 60; you can get rejected at 80.
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.
I've had more people in my life take their lives than... I think it's out of proportion with most people. I think a lot of them gravitate towards me because of the music.
It's still a trip for me to see somebody that I've only seen on television or in a movie. When they are there in real life, it's very different. When we played Detroit, Kevin Costner played before us.
I tell people retirement isn't what you think. You are going to sit around and waste your life, you can only golf so much. To stay young, you have to stay in the mix.
