Mom and sister played piano growing up; my grandma still plays piano in church. They always beat me over the head trying to get me to play piano, but I was more interested in riding dirt bikes and playing in the mud.
When I was little, my mom tells me, I used to say things like, 'Mom do you hear the string section? Do you hear the string section?' And she would look at me and say, 'No honey, I don't know what you're talking about.'
Mom and I often talked about the trip we'd someday take together to the 'city of eternal spring' where she was born. In Kunming, she said, the fruits are sweeter, the mountains look like Chinese paintings, and the weather is always perfect.
I've never necessarily chosen to be a bachelor. I've had girlfriends throughout the last 20 or 30 years. It's just that there were times when I met people that fascinated me and times I didn't.
I definitely got to a point where I realize how unusual it is to be able to play large, sold-out shows 30 years into a rock and roll career. I don't take it for granted.
It's very confusing when fame comes early on in your career. You get a little bit bent out of shape in terms of what's important. Fame is like the dessert that comes with your achievements - it's not an achievement in itself, but sometimes it can ove...
I don't know if it's a movement, but the only thing new that's happening is that I think music and art and video and fashion are all kind of thrown into one big ball that's on television, and people see that all the time - you see a fusion of all tho...
The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins a...
Everybody who's anybody has been competitive and over-sensitive and a bit silly. Look at Paul McCartney, look at Elton John. They're jealous of Justin Timberlake. I'm sure they were jealous of me when I was in my imperial phase.
I am touring in Europe. I am putting together a trio and a quartet. I am playing solo concerts with my symphonic sounds. I am very much engaged back to playing and recording and everything.
So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something wi...
A lot of my peers don't think about collaborating the way I do. My approach is to imagine my world. The Jason Wu woman isn't just floating around in a beautiful dress. I like to know where she's going, what she likes. I'm not just in the fashion busi...
I'd dropped out of high school without really doing it on purpose - I'd just go home at lunch 'cos I didn't have friends, then stay there all afternoon listening to rap. It got to the point where I wouldn't have passed even if I'd gone back. I was de...
I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery r...
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've...
To me I'm just a regular person going to the mall with friends, and now I'm in Forever 21 and I see this random group of girls staring at me and taking pictures. But now I usually have my dad, who is a really tall and intimidating person with me, so ...
My dad, Frank Addison Albini, was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didn't romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or p...
I had a few brushes with death, where I nearly chose to go. The final one in 1996 did it for me. I suddenly had that feeling that I wasn't indestructible. There was no big white light experience, I just felt this complete blackness and a huge voice i...
I don't think that there's much that sets me apart from other musicians, but I think there are definitely things that set me apart from other kinds of artists. I feel that musicians do it their own way, write their own songs and put on a great live s...
Most of the time when people work with an artist, they don't give them what they need for the future, they give them what their last album sounded like. So it's like, 'Oh, One Republic needs a song, why don't we send them 10 that sound like 'Apologiz...
I grew up playing hockey and some football, and I always think about the first time you walk into the locker room on a new team. The cliques are looking at you funny, and you make one friend, but then they're trying to stab you in the back.
