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I do dance music, and I can be pretty camp myself from time to time.
You know, I don't like talking about music very much. I have quite the hard time explaining myself.
I'm the worst critic about music myself. I hardly ever, ever like something the first time I listen to it.
As a musician myself, it annoys the hell out of me to watch an actor trying to play a guitar out of time with the music.
Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
My solo music started as a way to really look inwards, and to spend time completely by myself with an instrument, without any outside dialogue.
I definitely use my music to kind of alleviate my stress and get me through specific moments in time where I'm just being really tough on myself.
When I have a chunk of time that I can really dedicate to music, I really want to get into it. I want to do some really hard stuff and push myself.
Instead of yelling and screaming or losing myself all the time, I release everything in my music, and that's kind of how I expel my demons, as you would say.
I said to myself a long time ago that I didn't want to be that hanging-on-for-too-long, aging-rock-musician guy, and that's why I sort of got away from music.
I definitely try to broaden the scope of music. I don't know if it's pop or classical or what, but I'm religiously challenging myself all the time, for better or for worse.
I don't really like meetings, I like recording and performing music. I need to set myself up for when the time does come that I need better distribution or just a bigger team behind me.
Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.
Making music is an inward and outward gesture at once. I make it because I'm communing with a side of myself that might help me look people in the eye. But at the same time, I'm reaching out, in a way.
Maybe I don't ever fully switch off, but I think the way I offset that is by splitting my time between film and music. I always want to challenge myself and grow, fail, self-flagellate, and then try again.
I make my music to express everything I feel is necessary to communicate at a given time. Through music, I can express myself with statements that are more nuanced and more contradictory than factual details.
I had to go through being there for people and overextended myself to finally get to a place where it was finally time to figure my stuff out. Whether that was working on my music or working on me as a person.
When I really started liking music was when I could play some of it myself, and after a couple of years of playing folk music, I kinda rediscovered those hits that were on the radio all the time when I was a kid.
I don't take breaks, man. In the past, I used to spend my free time getting in trouble, and now I spend it working on my music. If I'm not playing drums with my cover band, Chevy Metal, I'm working on songs for myself.
In my mid 30's, after a decade or so of giving full time to the music thing and finding myself with about $10 in the bank and no assets other than my musical equipment, I realized I needed to get serious about making a living.
Growing up, I was trying to make it in music. I was grinding, which is just what I loved doing. I didn't have nothing else to do. In my spare time, I'd record myself. Find a beat, pulling em up. Just making something and creating for me.
I've become more introverted as I've got older. I used to be an outgoing person who joked around a lot, but as the amount of energy I expend by sharing my music has increased, I like to balance it by spending time by myself and recuperating.
I wouldn't call myself at all as a crossover artist - I kind of hate that word - but in a way, you need to see me like that, because I'm working in classical music, I'm doing these other projects, and I'm having a rock career at the same time.
I started to music when I was about 19 years old. Most people that do music, they get training, or they develop themselves before they let their music out. For myself, I was actually developing myself and putting my music out at the same time.
At 16 I was living in the Congo, and, you know, it's your teenage time. I really wanted to find a way to express myself, so I started to write songs in the Congo, and I think that's why my music is quite open, with a lot of different influences.
For the longest time, I didn't even want to admit I was serious about music. Before the Shins, I would tell myself, 'Oh, I'm going to figure something out someday.' I had this romantic vision of being this old dude maybe making guitars or something.
I would find myself being inspired by things that I've heard as a kid: Nigerian music or African music, some French music or some Jamaican music. When it's time for music to be made, it's almost like my ancestors just come into me and then it's them.
I'm a serious student of music, a perfectionist in the studio, and I take the arrangement and production of it very seriously, down to the mixing and mastering even. But at the same time I'm having so much fun with it. I try not to take myself so seriously.
When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'
With this new album, I prepared for it a long time, and I was happy with the songs and the production. I felt that I proved myself with the first album, and with this new album, I just want to share some of my music. And that was always my feeling and my intention.
I could draw up a list of about 30 artists who I apparently sound like. From Lady Gaga, to Katy Perry to Lana Del Rey. I don't know if it's because I'm versatile or because production affects how people judge music. I can't wait for a time I can just be classed as myself.
Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something; let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks, and I'm an upper.
What I do is I get the sheet music and I put it out for myself and then I use a visual tuner to go through each note individually. And every time I make a mistake, I start the song over again, so I use the muscle memory of intervals and then watching that tuner, and then a lot of repetition.
I play piano and guitar and I do write my own stuff so to a certain extent I know what I want to do in regards to music. But I'm still finding out what kind of music is my favourite kind to listen to, never mind do myself so I've got a lot of time to find out myself and develop myself as an artist.
Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.
I have a younger brother and sister who actually play in my band, and we were always into Disney music, big time. The first time I heard myself sing was when I recorded myself singing a Disney song. I remember it because it was awful, and I didn't expect to hear that. I think it was 'A Whole New World' from 'Aladdin.'
Even now, at 82 years old, if I don't learn something every day, you know what I think? It's a day lost. Now, I don't practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I'm doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.