And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music,...
I always went to Ireland as a child. I remember trips to Dundalk, Wexford, Cork and Dublin. My gran was born in Dublin, and we had a lot of Irish friends, so we'd stay on their farms and go fishing. They were fantastic holidays - being outdoors all d...
I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little asha...
I think it's a very dangerous game to play when you assume that just because someone's an entertainer, they're automatically a role model. Entertainers are there to entertain. They aren't there to teach your children the lessons that you haven't both...
You go to something like the Golden Globes, and it's the most glamorous place you could ever be, but then you go home and you're still like, 'Urgh, this dress is too tight, I wanna take off these shoes and put on my pyjamas.' At the end of the night ...
I had a somewhat religious upbringing. Not strict, but it was there, and I'm kind of thankful for that. If you grow up just watching MTV, that's its own form of religion, and it's not even based on happiness or communal responsibility. I mean, try to...
Maybe it's just, I've always been to the less traveled places, in any topic, whether it's history, I always like to just choose the most obscure topic. And I don't know why I have that impulse. I can't really explain it but I've been doing that since...
I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.
He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of t...
At the Oscars, if you didn't vote for '12 Years a Slave,' you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn't share, but it's not like I'm a fascist or a racist. Th...
The talk-box thing that T-Pain does is something new and different for this generation because they don't know about Zapp or Teddy Riley. I think he's creative and has made the talk-box his own in the hip-hop world, but if these young ones studied th...
All of the agreed-upon pariahs throughout pop-culture history put their identities into the thing we decry. And yet we derive our own identities from the act of hating. We connect on the things we are disappointed in. Some may argue that nothing in h...
I went to regular schools and I was home schooled a lot but I don't have any history in schools. Like, I literally don't exist. I didn't even get a birth certificate until the mid-80s. I always feel like I could be, like, 10 years younger, or maybe I...
One of the greatest live recordings, I think, in the history of the world is Ray Charles in Atlanta... And they didn't even have a big mobile recording thing set up. The word on the street was they only had like two microphones, one for the band and ...
It's easy to forget history or give it a cliff notes. The cliff notes of history. But mainly, so much of what happens in 'Eyes on the Prize' happened in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi isn't really known for any other touchstone to the mov...
There's only one band that could ever even pretend to assume the mantle of what the Beatles did, who have been so pre-eminent and world-dominating that they could effect a paradigm shift in the culture, who have been willing to leverage their success...
My dad always said that 90 percent of marital problems could be solved by getting your blood sugar up, and he's right! So I would say pick a partner who's forgiving when you have low blood sugar and threaten to drive your car through your shared home...
When I go to Indian reservations in the West, and especially to the Pine Ridge Reservation, I sometimes feel unsure where to put my foot when I open the car door. The very ground is different from where I usually stand. There are fewer curbs, fewer s...
When I was really little I would sit in the back of my dad's car when he'd be playing old-school music. He'd turn down the music and turn around and I'd be singing and know all of the words but I didn't even know how to talk. From then on I've always...
It's funny how we 'do' Christmas. Christmas is not something that we do, it is something that was done. It celebrates the long awaited arrival of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. We had nothing to do with it, but what we can do is praise God for the coming...
Being a child that grew up with a single mom back in the '70s, Father's Day to me was always a very uncomfortable time. At school, we would make Father's Day cards for our dads, and I usually mailed one to my dad, and he hardly ever responded.
