I've been a solo artist for a year now, and I think I should start thinking about the future now. Every spare time I get, I want to be in the studio and work on music for 2015. It's a lot of work.
It's a bit like school camp, shooting a film. Everyone's on heat. It's a strange energy. It's full of adrenalin. I funnel my excess energy in funny little ways. I do a lot of dancing in my trailer. I love music.
There were a lot of R&B groups that were my heroes, but the funny thing about my career and the way it went and where it went, at first I didn't really want to do pop music. I was a little bit more into jazz and R&B.
I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences; Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I'm sure I'd love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.
I think it's funny how excited people can get about things I say that don't have anything to do with music. I made a disparaging comment about McDonald's on Twitter once and people flipped out on me.
When I was in high school, I was a bad singer. I mean, all my early acting was musical theater, and my first ever show was 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' Everyone's familiar with it. I played priest number 3 and sang so out of tune that it's not even funn...
Every James Brown cut makes a party get crazy. He's the god of all music. I always play different wild remixes of his songs because people start bugging out when they realise what I'm playing.
Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration as...
One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.
I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.
I've been playing music all my life, from being a choir soloist at Symphony Hall as a youngster to playing in bands through high school and college at Kent State. Went in the service at 17, out before I was 21.
The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.
I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.
When I signed that major-label contract when I was 20 years old. I did it because I wanted to play music for the rest of my life. That's every 20-year-old's dream - to do whatever the hell you want.
Music has always been my back door to life. It is important for people to find something that excites them. I like the concept that if you do what excites you, you will be rewarded generously, whatever form reward takes, which is not necessarily mone...
We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come secon...
I think music is about our internal life. It's part of the way people touch each other. That's very precious to me. And astronomy is, in a sense, the very opposite thing. Instead of looking inwards, you are looking out, to things beyond our grasp.
It's wonderful for me to see what 'We Will Rock You' has done. 'We Will Rock You' and 'We Are the Champions' have kind of transcended the normal framework of where music is listened to and appreciated - they've become part of public life, which I fee...
One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful. Artistically I'm not as much of a heavyweight as someone like Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, because I'm not a creator of original music, and I worrie...
I would say country is the one type of music I've spent the least amount of time with in my life. I grew up in Virginia, where there was a lot of it, but I was more interested in rock and roll. Southern rock.
My new music video, 'My Life' featuring Eminem and Adam Levine, the only person in the actual video who you can physically make out besides myself and Adam Levine is Andre Dirrell.
