I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.
I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.
When I was growing up listening to music, it was 2004, when The Starting Line and Finch and The Used were kind of my favorite bands.
I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I never took music lessons. I was just playing around in front of the mirror and being silly, then suddenly I started making songs.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
I grew up mostly with classical, big band, and a lot of Irish music - I really didn't start listening to rock and roll until I was maybe sixteen.
I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.
That internal ache is the starting point of country music. If it's a happy song and I can still feel sad in it? That's my favorite.
I started to use music almost like a therapist, where it's like, everything that I don't really dare to say or speak about, I can sing about.
When we started there was this element of these experiments we were doing where we weren't really sure how the music would play out because the music was all on different players.
When the music industry started collapsing, the logical people understood that the only place to go for shelter was the underground. If the world on the surface is burning up, and you know people that have bunkers, go to the bunkers.
Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems.
We'd be working in our motel room through the night, and I'd come up with an idea at two in the morning, and he'd start jumping up and down, pacing across the room, or whatever.
I always start everything with the weather, because the weather is the first thing that I notice when I wake up in the morning.
Burning desire to be or do something gives us staying power - a reason to get up every morning or to pick ourselves up and start in again after a disappointment.
Cut your morning devotions into your personal grooming. You would not go out to work with a dirty face. Why start the day with the face of your soul unwashed?
The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
It was huge to read the Proverbs of the day every morning, it was huge to read the Psalm of the day every morning and to get that in us and get us going before the day even started.
I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.
Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
