There's something really natural to me about being what they call in the business a "hyphenate." Being a musician-actor or writer-musician-actor.
When I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.
The shows are so different from each other, depending on whether I play with my band, Nine Stories, other musicians, an orchestra, only one or two members of my band.
As a musician, you never understand why people connect with certain songs.
One of the things that's influenced me musically was my experience at Brown University. I was surrounded by musicians that I really admired, and felt challenged to come up with music, lyrics, and recordings that stood up to the expectations of those musicians and myself.
There's something extremely fragile about musicians, and that's their strength.
I like to work with different musicians and producers to change the feels of every release.
I can honestly say my music is always going to be greater than my business side. Because I'm naturally a musician. And I don't have to get paid, I don't even have to have businesses. Business is business. And music is life.
I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each.
One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.
The jazz musician's function is to feel.
I like that I stand for something like American Idol which helps musicians and artists get out there. It's important to have shows like Idol because it's so hard to get into the music industry nowadays - nearly impossible.
I write and play music. I'd like to be a musician at some point.
When someone really respects and admires us as musicians to the extent that they want to work with us, it's really flattering.
I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.
The only thing I wouldn't like to do is to play roles as a musician. I'm not sure that I would be comfortable doing that, and I'm not sure I'd be very good at it. I think I would be better served, and would be a better partner, if I was in something outside of myself.
The longer you've been acting, normally, the better you are at it. As a musician, it doesn't work like that.
Like the ability of all the musicians to end the song at the right time. Or when it's time for a chord change, but nobody knows what the chord should be, and you all, you know, it all just changes, magically, at the same time. It's when you pick up your phone to call someone and that person is calling you.
We joke about it in the entertainment industry: Every actor wants to be a musician, and every musician wants to be an actor.
When a street musician lowered his violin to inquire, 'Hey lovely, what you got there?' she said, 'Musicians who ask questions,' and kept on dragging.
When I worked with General Electric, again this was soon after the Second World War, you know, I was keeping up with new developments and they showed me a milling machine and this thing worked by punch cards - that's where computers were at that time, and everybody was sort of sheepish about how well this thing worked because in those days machinists were treated as though they were great musicians because they were virtuosos on these machines.
I was a musician who began playing with computers, to see if they could make some tasks simpler. I developed some "tricks" or strategies for working with audio files, and then discovered that the same tricks could be applied to video files, or really, any type of data. Previously I made many different kinds of music. I did some work as a composer of film scores. In that role, my task was to create audio to match and deepen the visual. In my work now, the role is often reversed: I have to create images to match and deepen the audio.
Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.
I am a musician who stopped working with music. Now I work with visual music, or audio-visual music.
I've never been a fearful person. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress, a writer, and a musician and I never really processed that those are the three hardest jobs - I just never even processed it.
