Music helped me to get out of a rough period in my life when I really struggled to see any future for myself and was terrified about what was happening to the people around me.
And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue - you know - of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. And I just couldn't quite accept that.
I don't know why the guys with the big money don't find five terrific young producers and give each of them enough to commission a musical and to live on for a year. You'd be likely to get at least one project with a future.
I remember seeing McCoy Tyner in concert, and thinking that the music was incredible, but wanting to be invited in. I figured that humor was the way of letting the audience in. I've gotten a hard time about it, but I love to be funny onstage.
I've always loved the blues, ever since I was a kid. It has a depth to it that a lot of contemporary music doesn't have. It has pain and suffering in it, but funny stories, too. And it is built on storytelling, which is something I really love.
I can count on one hand the people who are legendary in my book, and Tom Waits is certainly right at the top. It's funny, though: When I tell people that I like Tom's music, it surprises them.
My musical director, Mark Cherry, is the most wonderful person who ever lived on God's good green Earth. He's my director, he does the arrangements. Really, he does everything - including certain janitorial chores!
Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God.
Music is by no means something I was like, 'I'm going to make a career out of this!' It's the only thing I know how to do, so it was more like, 'I hope to God I can make a career out of this!'
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
I think people should be able to have at their behest, like, four hours of music, entertainment, visual knowledge, different pathways. That's what I'm trying to do with modern technology, not just another song and another song.
So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.
Music is a prerogative of those who are willing to spend time to study it, understand and love it, well aware of the fact that one life is not enough to improve just one single note of what has already been written and performed.
Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.
Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It's transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It's uplifting, it's encouraging, it's strengthening.
There's so much chaos in life, I think I make music to make things feel calm and sane, to define something, to bring some meaning into it - it's a real peaceful thing to me.
For a person as obsessed with music as I am, I always hear a song in the back of my head, all the time, and that usually is my own tune. I've done that all my life.
When I graduated from high school, the teacher said I was throwing my life away following music, and the same teacher invited me back to speak at the school. I don't say that to brag, I just want to be an example.
I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain so to speak and kind of being able to vent it through my music.
All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.
