I am very aware now that music is a business, but there is also a way to go about making music that is true to yourself as opposed to doing, you know, just going through the motions and making things that would just be commercially successful.
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.
Writing is not work. In fact, there's nothing better. Writing is something that if the music business went completely away tomorrow - radio stations quit existing and music quit being popular and it was old hat - I would still write songs.
In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea i...
I'm not saying that people have to listen to rock music. It's a great, cool thing and it can really be liberating for a lot of people but, hey, so can Charles Dickens so I'm not going to judge.
There is a bit of a movement as far as younger people in country music. That is cool because people are saying things like, 'I didn't listen to country music until so-and-so came along.' And I'm like, 'Yeah! Now you know why I love it.'
Look at Neil Diamond. Was he the cool guy? No, he was the housewives' guy. He didn't try to be what he wasn't. He just did what he did - made great music, was a good entertainer, nice-enough guy.
Sure, I love people, and I want to communicate with people. I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.
There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say.
Growing up, I put a lot of pressure on myself. I felt with The Beatles legacy that there was pressure on me to do music, and while I always loved music and it was always around me at home, I thought about doing other things.
My parents loved music, and my father would come home with cassette tapes of Chic and the Village People and Barbra Streisand. We had all these sounds always going. We never had somber music - always upbeat.
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.
If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed, and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other's problems.
The idea of a musical comedy was something we had had in mind for many years, but the project 'Igudesman & Joo: A Little Nightmare Music' has a history that goes back five years. I can say that this is the most successful project that we have ever do...
The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed n...
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.
I grew up with the Highwaymen, which was Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. Mom and Dad rode rodeo, so country music was always in the house and the car. They threw in some Dolly Parton, too.
I'm not a fan of musicals at all, but I do think 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' is a very good. I always thought 'Walk the Line' was very good, too. I was in 'Nowhere Boy.' I played Paul McCartney. That was kind of musical - we did songs in that.
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.
Pitbull is great with brands. Endorsements with hip-hop artists work because hip-hop artists typically set the most trends... It's every brand's goal to be seen in the mainstream, and hip-hop music has become mainstream music.
