I have a room dedicated to music and recording. I go there first thing in the morning and just before I go to bed. And it has a window to my street, so I can watch all the crazies walking by.
I look at WorldstarHipHop in the morning, Bossip, Global Grind, and everything in between, but it's all so quick, I don't even think about it. And I've never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music.
Well, my mom taught public school music for almost 40 years. And she's about 5 feet - and very mighty. And she would control her kids a lot by giving them the eye, or the stare.
I was very influenced by the musicals and romantic comedies of the 1930s. I admired Gene Harlow and such, which probably explains why, since the end of my marriage, I've dated nothing but a succession of blondes.
The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
Since the big band started I'm just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it's very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music.
But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things, usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.
You know, I think when people fly the nest a little too soon, as far as getting involved in movies, anything beyond the music can make it suffer, I just want to make sure that I'm not that guy.
The whole point of the game is not to stick with one thing, because when that one thing ends, then what are you going to do? For me, I have movies, '106 & Park,' music, and other things to fall back on.
I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
We were raised without movies, theater or music. We had only nature, the hills, the trees. When I got on the set of 'Manon,' I wasn't star-struck because I didn't know what a star was.
Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right, from the dialogue to the music to the lighting to the narrative context; everything is just perfect, and something magical happens - the film breaks through the screen and does so...
Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels ...
[Finally getting his interview with Russell Hammond] William Miller: So Russell... what do you love about music? Russell Hammond: To begin with, everything.
Sapphire: They don't even know what it is to be a fan. Y'know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.
Dr. Dreyfuss: [entering his apartment, he suddenly hears loud music starting from next door] Mildred! He's at it again.
August Rush: [in voiceover] But I believe in music... The way that some people believe in fairy tales.
Wizard: You got to love music more than you love food. More than life. More than yourself.
I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.
And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.
Although my other ambition was to be a musical theater star (and I would attend college on a voice scholarship), writing was never far from my mind.
