I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.
I was lucky enough to have the talent to play baseball. That's how I treated my career. I didn't think I was anybody special, anybody different.
I did a 'Children of the Corn' remake for Sci Fi Channel. I play the Peter Horton role from the original, and Candace McClure from 'Battlestar Galactica' is my Linda Hamilton.
My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
I like to play people that are real, a real person, and then something that's interesting with that person. I think it's a lot more challenging to do that than something that's extremely fantasy-like.
But I've been surprised over the years. I mean, someone told me the other day that maybe 360 million people have played this game in the world. That's a lot of people.
I got to play with ZZ Top and introduce Bryan Adams and George Michael. And to have it all topped off by me winning 'American Idol?!' It's pretty absurd.
With Whitesnake it would have been inappropriate for me to have played Deep Purple songs, although I did at the beginning because I didn't have enough Whitesnake songs.
Norah Jones is a breath of fresh air. Norah Jones can sing and play. She's got some talent. I was totally ecstatic that that girl got noticed, because she's wonderful.
While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.
I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.
For hundreds of years, that was the major form of entertainment: The grown-ups sat around and watched the kids play. Now they sit around and watch the television. The actors are the kids.
It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.
When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn't believe the sound. I said, 'See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.'
You shouldn't even be writing this story if you haven't heard me play live. You can't write with the passion you receive until you see a Dick Dale concert.
When I start playing I'm just a rollercoaster of sound. I don't know what's coming next, I never do, and I sit and sign and talk to the people afterwards.
Anybody who's ever had the privilege of seeing me play knows that I am the greatest pitcher in the world.
When I heard BB King's 'Sweet Sixteen,' I knew I wanted to play bass because that was the thing that made that record: the bass player.
I played with so many musicians and some of the musicians would have something I want. I steal a lot of them, and I mash it up, I mash it up into my chords.
Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition.
