My parents played the radio, but music was never an obsession or something that I thought I could call a career.
For most Americans, my Chinese music feels like a novelty, and it's not what it is for me.
I spent all of my twenties feeling very angsty about trying to make a difference. I wanted to establish a touring circuit that would revolutionize the way subculture music was received in China. But now I'm older, and I don't feel as strongly about h...
I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn't intervened, I'd still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.
I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same m...
A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.
Where music leads, I follow.
I direct a lot of TV commercials and music videos.
I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.
I started taking music lessons and singing when I was about ten.
I'm actually one of the few kids in my grade, especially girls, who didn't end up going to college, just because I already knew what I wanted to do. I had already been actively working in music before I graduated.
Growing up, I never listened to English music. I was more into Motown, as well as early rock n' roll like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Most of all I want to make pop music that has something real behind it.
Telling people that I wanted to make dance music, or be on the radio, they looked at me like I was crazy because there was nothing like that in Lichtenstein when I was getting started. That's why I went to Germany, because there is industry there.
I have always made commercial music. The people who vote for the Grammy nominees are mostly in their 40s and have other jobs or are musicians themselves. They like music that they can relate to - they like commercial music.
I really like writing music. That's kind of like my little hobby. I like that because sometimes you don't really have any control when you're an actor, over what you're doing next, and everything is kind of decided by other people. You're always wait...
I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.
I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.
I don't listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It's all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You'd have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music - I couldn't sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.
I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.
In Evita I wasn't really hugely involved with it. I gave a little bit of help but they needed a bit of technical help on the movie and so some of my music people went in at the end of the movie and helped out with it.
