A lot of people see electronic music as a flavor of the week, but it can be more than that - has to be more than that.
Blending tracks and weaving and manipulating prerecorded music to create this mood, some people do it much better than others.
I think people in electronic music are trying to get these big features: 'Oh my gosh, I'm gonna get the biggest pop star to feature on my track.'
I do feel like there's a level of ridiculousness going on in electronic music... It's getting borderline absurd out there.
I studied communications, only because I could get my own show on the campus radio station. I never thought of it as a career. Music was always a really passionate hobby - it was like collecting DVDs or stamps.
I think people look at dance music and see it as kind of a bad thing, and bad people hang out in nightclubs, but it never felt that way for me. Growing up in Chicago, music was the thing that saved me, that kept me on the straight and narrow.
The producers and writers of dance music are becoming the stars, not so much the DJs.
People don't listen to terrestrial radio. They don't find their music that way. They don't get their news that way. They go to blogs. They go through Sirius/XM. They go through all these different places.
Music leaves such a big impression. I always wondered, 'Man, if I grew up in Nashville, would I be making Country records now?' I honestly feel like Chicago had such a big impact on me.
Music evokes a lot of different emotions and triggers different senses.
Listening to music is such an uplifting, spiritual thing. It's far-fetched to some - I understand that. But the way dance music brings people together, it's not a big stretch from hymns.
I've always had a passion for music, but I never saw me as a musician for a living. I never thought that I could make a living. It never dawned on me.
When I graduated college, I had a fairly successful weekly club gig and was buying more studio equipment and writing my own music. I realized I didn't want to work.
In nearly all ballads, the words set the mood and meaning, while the music intensifies or enhances them.
If rock-and-roll is well done, there's nothing so terribly wrong with that kind of music. But the lyrics are another story.
I just can't read music.
And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive.
I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, and a lot of folk music.
Music is extremely intuitive, which acting too in a different way.
Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music.
No acting, no production, could take the place of that moment when you come out in the dark on to the stage and the drummer plays four beats on the hi-hat and then lights and music. It just takes your breath away. No words can do what music can.
