Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I remember when I first came out on tour, it was Greg Norman and Nick Price. We forget how big Norman was, what a presence he was. I remember one of my first tournaments, Greg threw an orange peel down on the ground and some fan ran over and grabbed it. 'This is Greg Norman's orange peel!'
I was doing a tour of the 'Batman' live stage production, and I challenged the cast to join me to run. One time, we were running in Switzerland just before Christmas, and it was heavy snow. Another time, we were running down the Seine in Paris on Christmas Day, and we all had Santa hats on.
A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.
I was in 'Jacques Brel' Off-Broadway for many years, so I've always been a singing actress, but the songwriting was a complete surprise. I had never written a song in my life. We were on the road with 'Jacques Brel' doing the national tour, and I picked up a guitar one day and I wrote a song.
'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.
Being a musician, especially at the major label where you work for so long, it becomes a cycle. Write a record, make a record, tour. It's just this cycle, and I don't think there's any life built into it with time to assimilate what's going on in front of you and what's going on in your head.
I try to find 15 minutes a day to just be alone without any distractions just for headspace to meditate and get my Zen on. I think that helps me get through the hecticness of the day on tour with the interviews, the sound check, the meet and greets, the show and the post-show meet and greets.
The difference between the American version of 'Live Aid' and the British one - in England, if you wanted a cup of tea, you made it yourself. If you wanted a sandwich, you bought it. In typical American style, at the American concert, there were laminated tour passes and champagne and caviar.
My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online. I started with a website, Jasonmraz.com, pre-YouTube. You could e-mail me directly, and I would send you a CD.
'The Blair Witch Project' is great for motion sickness. The first time you see it, it is extremely creepy. The first time I saw it, I saw it on a bootleg tape on a tour bus before it had even come out. It was one of the first movies I'd seen like that. I didn't even realize it was a damn movie!
More than anything I want to get up there and hang out with the audience, make everybody feel like it's fun and they're involved and are just, like, friends hanging out in somebody's living room. I went to see Carole King on her 'Living Room' Tour, and that's the kind of feeling I'm aiming for.
Once you've been on tour six, seven years, you get an idea of what works and what doesn't work universally. There will be some crowds that we just can't play a song, but we've got 90% of a show that we know is going to be a hit with the Lupe Fiasco fan. I think the catering has already been done.
After my second-to-last record, 'The Greatest', I had gone on tour for a while, and I didn't play an instrument for about five years. And I got kind of - it's not self-esteem or whatever, or anger toward myself - but disappointed in myself that I hadn't been challenging myself to learn musically.
After 12 intense years of rock music, I was happy to get away from making a record and going out on a tour. When I did it, I wanted to feel inspired. After a while I finally had my fill working on other people's music, and I started coming up with music on my own and said, 'This could be for me.'
I'm in this really cool place in my career, where the stage I'm on that night, whether it's the Paisley tour, the CMT tour, or a bar with 10 people in it, it is the most important show I've ever played in my life. I go to the ends of my imagination to do something that's unforgettable every night.
When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they're part of a family, not just a tour.
Whenever I approach a record, I don't really have a science to it. I approach every record differently. First record was in a home studio. Second record was a live record. Third record was made while I was on tour. Fourth record was made over the course of, like, two years in David Kahn's basement.
I really like the group tour better than going it alone. First of all, it kind of takes the pressure off a little. I'm not a naturally extroverted person. But I also like it because it brings in new fans. For example, someone who really loves Aprilynne Pike's books might pick up mine and vice versa.
I went to dinner with my mother-in-law and I just realized I was talking in sound bites to her and expecting her to laugh every time I said anything or be jotting something down in a notebook. So you have to kind of really have a talk with yourself after you've done a press tour and say, 'Chill out!'
The think that we hung the film version all on was 'Hedwig' on tour. On stage, it's one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.
I think any branding for me is band-related. It's really weird to get used to the exposure, because I am a naturally introverted person, and I'm not exactly social. Occasionally I can get comfortable enough to talk, but I spend a lot of my days not talking, especially when I'm at home and not on tour.
When eating out while on tour, a great place to get vegetarian food is Thai restaurants, as they have lots of options. I absolutely adore salad and vegetables - I will eat salad until it's coming out of my ears. Although I think it's great in any form, my particular favourite has to be beetroot salad.
I think it's a cool thing to have kids look up to me and to know that it doesn't matter, your background or your ethnic background. If you have goals and dreams, you can achieve them. I am extremely proud to be Tongan and Samoan, and to be the first on Tour and the first in the Masters is a cool thing.
I don't know if I'm selfless - I still want to make a great record. I want to make a hit record. I want to tour; that's not completely selfless. But the truth is I'm not interested in people coming to my show for me as much as I am for them coming to my show for themselves. That's always been how I am.
I'd happily just stay on the road. Getting home from America, sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea, staring out of the window is pretty depressing. I didn't have a tour manager to tell me what to do so I had to start reaching out to people and making plans. That was hard. You become very vegetable-y.
When I was first writing, I was writing mostly about sporting events, which was really what my assignments were. I was working on the Tour de France bike race and the Barcelona Olympic Games, and those songs tend to be very big, very bombastic-type music, which is the type of music that I love to write.
I was born and grew up in Phoenix, and I left there when I was 17 to go to Interlochen Arts Academy - a boarding school in Michigan - for a year, and then I went to college for a year at The Boston Conservatory and landed the 'Spring Awakening' tour midway through my freshman year, which was pretty cool.
There's always apprehension whenever I launch anything, it seems. When I launch a tour, people are always, 'Oooh, is this gonna work?' And when I launch an album: 'Ooh, is this gonna work?' Or a new video. 'Really?' It's always like that - but I've always acted on the impulse that I have nothing to lose.
When we tour in America, the shows are great, and the fans are just as passionate and excited as anywhere else in the world, but in other parts of the world, in parts of South America and in parts of Europe and Asia, the size of the venues and the amount of people we get at concerts is considerably more.
Every now and then, Prince decides to try being a normal rock star. You know, the kind who does a professional arena tour where he plays the hits. But part of what makes him such an eternally fascinating star is that he lives in his own private purple world, even when he sets out to make the house quake.
The same thing I did in 2013 is what I'm trying to do in 2014, which is continue to improve, continue to shock people. You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I'll have another hour of stand-up material where I'll be able to go on the road and tour again.
My mother and my father have always supported me. Now in their eighties, they actually clamor onto the tour bus with me once or twice a year so they can watch the performances and hear the crowds. Traveling with eighty-something-year-olds on a tour bus... there has to be some sort of reality show in that.
You speak to the press at the Tour every day, but most often in a negative sense. Ninety per cent of the questions you are asked in the post-race press conferences are challenging or provocative, so you have to justify yourself; you have to try to give the right answers about every topic across the board.
My best artist friend is definitely Jason Aldean. He and I really get along great and are really great friends. It's fun to tour with a buddy and somebody that I just enjoy hanging out with. If we weren't touring together, we'd be hunting in the off-season still and knocking around doing stuff, certainly.
I don't really mind what people say about my love life or anything like that, but the one thing is that, yes, I do sing and write all my own music. That is something that I hold really dear. And yeah, I made a fool of myself in front of the world, but it was also great to pick myself back up and go on tour.
I certainly know that on our first tour of America in 1968, David Crosby came to see us backstage at the Fillmore East in New York, and I was very pleased to meet him from Buffalo Springfield and that kind of stuff. He didn't ask me anything about the music, but he said, 'Where'd you get your clothes, man?'
When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.
My goal when I started out was to get to the point where I could tour a lot and make a living, which means getting paid enough to hire my own band, travel and end up with a bit of money, but I'm still nowhere near that point. Because I didn't have a band and fan base when I started, I did everything backward.
The only way I'm going to support my family is to tour. I love playing, don't get me wrong. That 90 minutes every night, that's free. We get paid to travel. But every night, I have to get myself locked in. There are a thousand people that don't want to be disappointed, because they have a lot of expectations.
I find motion, literally, is where ideas come from. It's almost like a built-in rhythm section. The contents of the songs are about change, and a lot of that stuff happens when you're on tour, and you wake up and you're in a different place and you start thinking about where you're going and where you've been.
We saw a need to develop a community for artists to get their music out to the masses. With MySpace, when they went out on tour, they could actually tour nationally. The band might have 20,000 friends on their list and send out a bulletin saying, 'I'm going to be in Austin on Tuesday night. Come see our show.'
Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.
When I tour, it's like, well, like a food tour as much as a comedy tour. I try to eat at all the weird places, the obscure barbecue joints, burger places. There are a few spots in L.A. that I'm obsessed with - one of them is the Taco Zone taco truck on Alvarado. There are secret off-menu items that are amazing.
I'd like to have kids and a wife, and you know, drop them off at school and like, do normal things rather that constantly being on tour. Because I'm young now and I haven't really got a social life. This is all I do. It's the best job in the world, but I'll get to the point where there's more to life than work.
Doug Ford was one of the first of the old pros I saw during my first full year on tour, in 1963. To this day he's the best chipper I've ever seen. One thing Doug did was get the ball onto the green and rolling right away, keeping it as low as possible. He never hit his chips higher than was absolutely necessary.
By the time Guns n' Roses spent 28 months from 1991 to 1993 touring the 'Use Your Illusion' albums, the tour staff sometimes approached 100 people. We were carrying not only backup girl singers, a horn section, and an extra keyboard player, but also chiropractors, masseuses, a singing coach, and a tattoo artist.
I had no idea 'The Dream Weaver' would be so successful. Everything just fell into place with that album. I pioneered a number of ideas with that album and subsequent tour. The all-keyboard approach with no guitars was a new one, and I was one of the first to use a drum machine in concert. It was an amazing time.
When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.
When I was a senior in high school, I worked at a theater where they hired New York actors. And they told me about 'Backstage,' and so I got my school in Pennsylvania to subscribe. And there was an audition for a tour of 'The Sound of Music,' and I got the job. Deferred my admission to college just to go on tour.
When I finally finished the 'Two Suns' tour, which went on for quite a long time, I felt like a bit of a husk. And I remember thinking, 'I need to spend some time in one place, and just be at home.' So I guess the first year of that three and a half years was spent just trying to kind of get back to normal again.