My life revolves around my child's routine.
I see my fans as music lovers. I really love that. There's no age group or demographic. It's people of all ages and backgrounds. Country people and non-country people. I wanted to make music across the board.
Art is basically communication, and I think everyone who's a music lover has had that experience where a record or a recording has kept you company when no one else is around. And I think that is what I'm hoping that people get out of my music.
I just love performing so much, and I threw myself into every musical theater production that was going in my home town and at school. And then, I went to the National Youth Music Theatre, which was really a galvanizing experience for me when I was 1...
I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience - I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there's this musical eclecticism that happened.
I feel like if I won an award and I was giving my speech and the music started, that's all I'd remember, the humiliation I felt when the music started. It would mar the entire experience for me.
I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded.
The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.
I had business experience. I had made my living designing and building electronic equipment. Basic business was not new to me, but the music business was completely new to me. I knew nothing about distribution, or any of those things.
I'm a binge writer. I work in the music business fulltime, in artist management and developing songwriters and recording artists, and so juggling my job I carve out as much time as I can on the weekends.
My only real hobby is playing music. I write a lot of music on guitar and keyboards and hope one day to make a record or maybe even write the score for a film.
I did a lot of musical theater when I was younger, and I really hope to get back there someday. I miss singing a lot. I listen to Broadway show tunes in my car and sing along to them.
My dad is a singer, so it was always either music or acting with me. All the way up through college I was doing both, and even after college I was in a reggae band. Then the acting really started taking off, so the music had to become a hobby.
I do regret that when I went to college, I didn't have a liberal arts education. I got a BFA in musical theater, so it was a very directed toward what I was doing. I wish that I had expanded my horizons a little bit.
I never look for music by genre. I look for an artist who puts a dependable trademark on things. Like Elvis Costello - he's a great songwriter who presents his songs in a number of contexts. I feel the same about my own music.
School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.
The way the music comes to you starts to affect how you listen to music. When you're a kid, it's 'Does it rock? Does it make me feel good? Does it make me tap my feet? Does it make me go to sleep?'
I've always had a sick sense of humor, and I've always wanted that to permeate the music because I don't take myself seriously. I take the music seriously, but I know I'm not God's gift to anyone except my mom.
I really look forward to putting on a record. I love writing music and think that may be my strong suit even more than singing. I can't wait to take that music on tour and share it with as many people as I can.
It was about working with other musicians, but more than that it's about exploring musical areas that you could never do with the band you're in, in my case Judas Priest. You could tackle musical areas and lyrical areas that wouldn't be appropriate f...
The fact that people still know us is, in my opinion, a result of our music and of the big money that runs the music industry today. The people who control the industry are accountants who recycle everything in new, nostalgic packages, and everything...
