The best thing is to find something you really love to do and enjoy that process for the rest of your life.
I'm happy doing what I do. That's ok. Some guy could appear tomorrow and do it much better than me, and so be it, but right now I'm just happy to be who I am doing what I do.
You just write one word and that tells you what the next word is going to be.
I just want to make music on the drums.
You try to improvise in a compositional manner. You don't just do some stupid lick you've been practicing, scale form exercises or something.
I'm not going to limit myself in ways to compose or how I should record. You just do what you can with what you've got at the moment.
Japan and Europe seem to have a little more cultural education and so the crowds have been a little more big and enthusiastic, and the places I've played seem a little more classy.
I have great samples of my drums and I try to program them pretty much how I want to play them, try and make it feel natural even though it's programmed.
I really think kids should understand that music is like learning the alphabet. You put small letters together to make words, and then you use these words to create a story, but with music. And they really need to know how to mix and match those letters and how to come up with something that is really interesting, or speak in metaphors as poets do to show us something maybe we didn't think about.
There's things I'd like to do, but I've found that pretty much anything that I try to will to happen doesn't happen, but if you just kind of let go and let things fall into place, somehow I end up being able to do the right thing or the right time.
If you enjoy learning, if you enjoy the curiosity of music and what can be done with it, and stop looking at it as something you have to do because someone says this is what you have to do to be a professional, you know, learn it because you're curious about it and then I think you'll have a much better creative sense and enable this inner voice to come out. These things are not taught and are not encouraged.
You just chip away until the puzzle is complete.
Money and fame are very inconvenient and very problematic.
From the time I started playing solo drums, doing clinics and stuff, you know I think one of the largest selling clinics I ever did was in Chicago.
There are things I've kept over the years and then someday I might pull up a program of some tune that I've done and I go "Wow, I know what to do with this now".
Sometimes I feel like a one man crusade against the devaluation of music in America and culture in the arts.
I married my Japanese wife Mayumi who I'm so happy with, she's been so supportive. I live part time in Japan at her house, so I've been always very influenced by Japan. Since I guess the 70's or so. I've come to appreciate so much of their culture.
I think by the time I finished college I was calling myself a professional because I was, you know. I was making a living playing music.
I don't know where I'm going, and I don't care where I'm going. As long as I can just do it.
I'm not a haiku artist, but I wanted to use the phrase 5, 7, 5 in the melody that flows over time. So the string melody, the first one is five notes, the next one is seven, and then the third one is five.
There's nothing that can prepare you for fame and for the music business at any point in history.
I don't think I can play the game and sell myself.
Being a professional does not have a very high standard.
I try to put what's evocative in the music to me, I try and put that out there in terms of titles and imagery, or implication towards the listener.
I have tons of tunes, maybe 30 tunes that I still think are great, and only because some jerk at a record company didn't think it was great, it's not out there.
