Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research.
I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.
I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.
Can I - do I have to be obsessed with it and proceed from that? Not always. But when I'm on top of my game, I definitely think about the way that the world sees me and the way that the world thinks about painting. You must.
It was probably one of the things that gave me a sense of possibility and allowed for me to see beyond the small community that I existed within. You know, I was making friends with young Soviet kids. this is during perestroika. You know, there's bread lines and vodka lines. The entire social structure of what was then the Soviet Union was radically different from what we know today.
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.
Poverty is a plague against which humanity must fight without cease.
After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer. " But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.