I think that my love of cooking grew out of my love of reading about cooking. When I was a kid, we had a bookcase in the kitchen filled with cookbooks. I would eat all my meals reading about meals I could have been having.
If you take away money, if you take away the houses and things, who are we really? What is love really about? What is it to love each other? Why do we stay together, and why do all the kids split? All these questions I have really deep inside of me.
I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 ...
Part of my affinity with urban music comes from being on 'Kids Incorporated,' 'cos we used to sit around and listen to Chaka Khan and Prince, and I got influenced by all that. Then gangsta rap got started, and I was infatuated with that - maybe that'...
When I was a kid in the mid-'60s, I was what's known as a moddie boy, a prototype skinhead. You all had your hair like a crew cut, cropped, with suits or Levis with red suspenders, sometimes Doc Martens. It was a thriving soul music, Motown and ska s...
I'm the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It's a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but ...
We were very rich culturally. One Sunday each month, we would do this thing called Chamber Pots at somebody's house. A classical music group would come over and we'd have dinner. There were thirty people - parents and kids - and we'd sit on the floor...
I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would ...
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with.
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it's definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a write...
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.
Even as a kid, I never liked breakfast. I just don't like to eat then. I like to get up and work. I think sticking a whole bunch of carbohydrates in your stomach in the morning is probably the worst way to begin the day.
Well, when I was a kid and I watched 'Speed Racer,' I used to always watch it in the morning with my cereal. And when I ate the cereal, I would pour soda into the cereal because we never really had milk for some reason, I don't know.
At 14, I was the most disciplined guy around. I would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and run five miles, and then go to school. Sometimes I would run behind the school bus, and the kids thought I was just crazy. I knew what I wanted.
Some women work while they are pregnant, but not me. That was a choice I had made. That's when I took a break. Men can work at whatever stage they are; whether they turn daddy, they still have their own thing. But women can't afford that because by b...
My one complaint with my father as a parent is that, not only was he not a golfer, but also he was sort of opposed to golf. I was a country club kid growing up. I should have played golf, but my father thought golf was a sport for old men.
I'm not sure how young kids get to the point where they're memorizing and knowing songs, but I knew the words to 'Missing You' from John Waite probably from when I was three years old. For whatever reason, that was the song that I gravitated toward w...
When I was a kid, I wanted a Chanel bob and bangs. My mom said no. I went to the salon anyway, and they said, 'No way - we are not going to do that to your hair.' So I did it myself. Big mistake. Instead of my bangs going down straight, they were sti...
Oftentimes, even as a little kid, I would get up before anyone else. My brother would still be sleeping, my mom would still be sleeping, so I would literally play 'Monopoly' by myself. I would play board games; I would do things by myself.
I came to Hong Kong when I was five, but we didn't have any relatives in Hong Kong. My mom is a big movie fan, and she watched all kinds of movies, so when I was a kid, basically, we went to watch a movie every day.