When playing any song in front of an audience, you're watching them experience it, and it changes. In a lot of ways, it's almost like the music is just the background buzz to what's happening between you and the audience in the room.
I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.
Julia Child wasn't afraid to have fun. She made fantastic food but knew how to have a good time and not be too stuck up about the kitchen space.
No one really buys records anymore. You can look at sales and do that math real quick. Unfortunately, it's fast food in the music industry. People don't ingest full records anymore.
With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share ...
Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.
I would say that as I've gotten older, I trust my intuition more; I allow myself more freedom both musically, creatively and my own life existentially.
This is the first time in 10 years I don't know what I'm doing next, and I'm rather enjoying it. Soon I'll be climbing the walls no doubt, but right now, it's not clear, I'm just enjoying the freedom.
People have given me the freedom and believe in me enough to say if I want to do these things that I will find a way to make it work. I don't know if they think I'm crazy, drug damaged or just an old weirdo.
I took up boxing as a fitness thing. I got obsessed, and I would go every day when I wasn't working. It's just an insane sport when you get into it.
When I was a little kid growing up in Iceland, I always dreamed about creating something that could have an impact on the whole world, and even as a young boy I was passionate about fitness and sports.
I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.
I know it wouldn't seem like I've had a lot of failure in my career, but there are things that I regard as failures, when I look at certain performances and go, 'That's not good enough.'
When I got Jacob's Latter, I was nervous because I felt I wasn't allowed to fail. I felt that they were waiting for one little failure and that would prove them right and I'd be, 'out of there.'
You must not demand the failure of your peers, because the more good things that are around in film, in television, in theater - why the better it is for all of us.
Bacon is so good by itself that to put it in any other food is an admission of failure. You're basically saying, 'I can't make this other food taste good, so I'll throw in bacon.'
But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasn't even in the running for failure!
I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.
All I care is that my family, and my loved ones, understand me. Or that they understand me to a degree - I don't understand me very much. And I don't need the world to understand me. That is the most egocentric thing.
My family and I reside on a non-working farm, although we have a couple of horses and the usual stuff like pigs, cows, and chickens. We really don't have an honest-to-goodness farm, more of a hobby farm.
I had five brothers and sisters. Four of them older, and some of them played instruments, and we would get together and have family recitals and raise money for the church. I belonged to a wonderful church community that encouraged me to sing.
