I believe that in music and in a lot of things it's kind of like surfing, you can have a really big wave sometimes and then you can have a smaller wave.
I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.
I'd like a male to listen to my music and find it kind of fascinating, what a girl goes through when they get heartbroken or get sad or get hurt by something.
Well, I'll tell you, I don't know how aware teenagers are of me. I think it really depends on the teenager and how well-versed in music they are and what kind of music they like.
L.A. was just an inspiring kind of place to be. It felt like going to Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. Everybody's there. Everybody's hanging around. Everybody's talking about music.
Amazingly, I've been sort of an anomaly in the music industry. I feel like I've been able to exist as kind of a throwback artist.
When I was growing up listening to music, it was 2004, when The Starting Line and Finch and The Used were kind of my favorite bands.
I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.
I thinks it really interesting how they throw the world music samples in there. I often wonder what it would be like to do something like that, but use my lyrics and my kind of style.
When I do have time to work on music, I'm kind of selfish, and would rather work on my own stuff than someone else's.
I came into music just because I wanted the bread. It's true. I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted.
I don't actually have a lot of discipline. I've worked hard at music. But I feel like you know, I felt like kind of natural at it. I always had a knack for it.
And once the music is out there, when you're selling a record and selling music and people are going to do whatever they want with it, it's kind of hard to resist certain opportunities, especially in the record market now.
When I don't know what the music is going to be for a scene, I imagine some sort of orchestration going on and damned if they don't usually come up with a similar kind of thing.
Any of the rewards or accolades or any of that are very nice and everything but the music is what saves me. And it did. I would write my way out of any kind of depressing period.
There's a long tradition - certainly with country, but in all kinds of genres of music - to have humorous lyrics. Certainly with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and, if you look at country, Roger Miller and Jim Stafford.
When I was young, people were almost identified solely by the kind of music they liked. People fell into categories of who liked what.
I've pretty much run the circle of labels and dealing with that whole kind of battle, because you're the one creating the music, but you're not the final say. That's always been hard.
In the '90s, the radio was still alive with all different kinds of points of view, and I think that's why people are longing for that time. It was the first time that alternative music broke through to the mainstream.
Every one of us has a response of some kind to music, so I don't think it's fair to ever judge what is proper and what's not.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
