The bridge between wishing and accomplishing is discipline.
The fact that I can ever be open about my being gay is amazing! It's great that I don't have to hide it, but also it would be really nice if, in twenty years, it's not even a thing.
Obviously I think it's really important to look back at your history, and that's why I think things like Pride are important. It's not necessarily about your experience of life, it's not about whether you find it difficult to be gay; it's about the fact that people have fought over hundreds of years for this to be okay, and also that there are many countries in the world where it's still not, and it's very dangerous to be gay.
To a lot of people, my job is really fancy, so they're like, "Oh, whoah, you're a musician, wow!" Some people go to you, "Oh my god, you're a journalist!" And some people go, "What, you're a therapist? That's incredible!" So everyone, to a certain extent, has other people that you get impressed by, without even having a proper conversation or getting to know them. You're just like, "Oohhh, they're a bit fancy!"
People think I'm cool - it's a virtue of my job! In real life I'm absolutely not cool, but I think if you have the courage of your convictions, and you're confident in yourself, people will maybe think that you are even if you're really a massive dork. Everyone has a different job where, to someone else, your job is really fancy!
Pop music often deals with subject matter like breakups, or you have songs that are like, "I will love you forever," or "you're so hot right now," or "I really feel you," or "We should be together. " There aren't that many songs that are like, "I just walked into the room and now I have nothing to say because I feel so awkward because I fancy you so much. " There's not as many songs that deal with that awkward bit about love; about how you can really have such a huge crush on someone that actually is completely disabling.
I would feel really dishonest writing a song that was really sassy, or really confident, because I'm not a supremely confident being. I think that's what people find interesting about what I do; it's very different lyrically.
People tend to romanticize what they can't quite remember.
We say grace and we say ma'am. If you ain't in to that, we don't give a damn.
Great communication depends on two simple skills-context, which attunes a leader to the same frequency as his or her audience, and delivery, which allows a leader to phrase messages in a language the audience can understand.
It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.