Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.
Songs have taught me more about life than school ever has and how to follow my ambitions no matter what they are and how to live my life no matter the trade-off.
I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
You can get really left of centre influences in mainstream pop. Michael Jackson and Prince are some of the most progressive artists ever if you actually dissect their songs there's some crazy stuff going on.
And now that Martina McBride knows of T.I., and T.I. knows of Martina McBride, that made me very happy, too. It's introducing worlds to different people and bringing them together with a song.
For me, 'Atmosphere' was more about looking inwards and reaching out to people close to me. To emphasize the fact that I'm singing on the first single, this album is really more about me and songs that I've written instead of collaborating with peopl...
I am always getting ideas for song lyrics and keep a notebook handy. Nowadays, I take a laptop with me everywhere, because I have a stock of handwritten lyrics in it.
When I'm on a plane, I am the annoying person humming into my phone. Sitting there static with nothing to do, a lot of melodies come to me. So I've written a lot of songs on planes.
We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, 'People who need people are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lot's to eat.
I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.
I felt alive when I read a script and acted out a scene, or sang a song. It was my dream. I'm just very lucky that I'm still doing it and able to earn a living from it.
I don't know what any of my songs are about. I don't sit down to write about anything. They're about whatever you want. I don't pick subjects. I just start.
One of my favorite things is when people will ask for a song that I hadn't planned to play. It is really fun to see if you can remember something, and you don't always. I mean, sometimes it's just crash and burn.
I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.
Certain social situations make me feel like a square peg in a round hole. Realising you can connect to the human race through song makes me feel less alien.
I'm more prone to his '70s material, which is what I was around for and watched a lot. I listen to a lot of that stuff. It probably influenced me quite a bit. I'm more drawn to the darker, sadder songs.
I always give the encore over to chaos, so people can yell out requests and I can hack my way through a song that I don't really know anymore.
When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it 'Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,' after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.
With this album, I tried not to think too much. If I heard a song that I loved, I promised myself I wouldn't over-think it. If I loved it and if I wanted to cut it, I would.
The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.
