I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience - I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there's this musical eclecticism that happened.
I feel like if I won an award and I was giving my speech and the music started, that's all I'd remember, the humiliation I felt when the music started. It would mar the entire experience for me.
I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded.
I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water.
I grew up in a big ol' Latin family, so that's all the music we used to play - salsa music. We'd always dance and have fun. You know how families get down, man! We just had fun with it.
The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.
When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very use...
When you're in the music business, every day is the same. If you work 9 to 5, you can't wait for the weekend, but in the music business, you don't know one day from the next. It's always the weekend.
I had business experience. I had made my living designing and building electronic equipment. Basic business was not new to me, but the music business was completely new to me. I knew nothing about distribution, or any of those things.
The more people who come from musical backgrounds and go into promotion, production, songwriting, A&R, plus get their business head together, the better. They'll not only understand the business aspect, they'll also have a true passion and ear for ho...
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.
