I start really missing London when I go away. I have a little flat, but very central. I live above a pub and you'd think it'd be a nightmare, but I like hearing the music and it's quite comforting.
I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.
When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like. They called it a new type of something; they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting.
But I was always much more interested in reading fashion magazines than I was music magazines when I was a teenager. Just that sense of romanticism and escapism and the dream of it has always been quite alluring to me, as well as that sense of becomi...
A lot of the vocal music I've been doing recently has been quite clubby. But that's mainly because I've had more time to go to clubs, and that normally breeds that kind of influence.
My brother has a tendency to get quite lyrical when he writes music; he gets so romantic, it's borderline. I make it slightly more aggressive. I make the round corner a bit sharper.
There was a time when I was fighting with the decision as to whether or not a Hasidic man could go out and have a music career in the world and be involved in pop culture. For me, I was able to bring those two things together for quite some time.
Everyone's talking about how no one is buying records any more, but to me it's quite logical. In the 1990s, music was so hardcore-marketed to a certain group of people that I think a lot of kids felt taken advantage of.
Doing something like that, quite radically changing your approach to sound in one go, could leave you high and dry. It's happened before where people have changed direction and then everyone's stopped liking their music.
I have to say that when you tour the world, obviously, the jetlags and different hours and ways of living and traveling, a lot of hours in the plane, and you wake up in the morning and you're not quite sure where you are, and it is very tiring.
I was a very undisciplined person but acting was something that actually motivated me to get up in the morning. I hadn't experienced that before, but it was something that really excited me. I think I could be quite self-conscious and it gave me a re...
You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has...
The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.
It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.
I'm an American designer. It's important to riff on that. I remember, when my mom and I first came to the States, she was so shocked that everyone was so dressed down in sandals and shorts. It's not quite like that in Asia. To give that a superluxuri...
I'm quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.
Lt. Rooney: Who are you? What's your name? Mortimer Brewster: Well, usually I'm Mortimer Brewster, but I'm not quite myself today.
James McNamara: Well, it certainly looks at this moment that Howard Hughes will be around the United States for quite some time to come.
Church Congregation: [singing] Now is a time of great decision/Are we to stay or up and quit?/There's no avoiding this conclusion/Our town is turning into shit.
Occasionally I do things against my inner voice, but you really should go for the thing that touches you most-even if you don't quite know why it does.
Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.
