Their eagerness for the big-band music and their ability to grasp the essence of it made me realize that today's generation has not been properly exposed to the big-band sound.
My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.
Mozart's music is like an X-ray of your soul - it shows what is there, and what isn't.
I had an opportunity to play baseball in college, but I just didn't want to go to school. I started focusing on my music and it was game over!
Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.
The movie Spinal Tap rocked my world. It's for rock what The Sound of Music was for hills. They really nailed how dumb rock can be.
How I set myself apart is by creating the sort of real and honest music, which is who I'm also trying to be.
I do play the guitar, but I do it for fun. And I am terrible at writing music as well. I have tried and failed, horribly.
I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations - some large and some small.
I was lucky enough to have parents who started me on music very early, but most kids don't get that kind of exposure.
I guess professionally it began when Hal Hartley used some music of mine in his film The Unbelievable Truth.
I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.
But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.
In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.
Will.i.am and I performed at Wango Tango. That's when my daughter said that I had made it in music.
You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.
When you hear my music and you feel the emotion, it's real. When you see me in a film and you see a tear, it's real.
I used to judge the quality of music by whether I could make a 90-minute cassette and not repeat any artists.
I feel I was born with the music coming to me, and that's not something to be wasted.
I won't lie - when you're first bringing out music and you want people to notice, you probably overdo it, especially as a girl.
So okay, I accepted, and I realized while working for that concert that I'd been missing something very important and vital to me, and that something was music.
