When you have a chef that wants to be in the spotlight, maybe after one or two appearances on a show, they think they're at a certain level that they haven't reached yet in the kitchen. Shows like 'Top Chef', 'Hell's Kitchen' have helped bring attention to the culinary world.
I grew up listening to pop; I grew up listening to '60s pop music, the Beatles, the Monkees, Herman's Hermits and all that stuff. So I had a very strong background of listening to great pop music.
I mean, I do consider that my music is pop because Ive been influenced by pop music my whole life; I grew up in the States and 80s pop music was my biggest influence.
We grew up with a different gauge on what pop is. Pop for us was INXS and John Farnham.
Because I grew up listening to and watching loads of pop/pop rock videos, I'm very influenced by the 1990s.
I'm still looking for the rules of what is and isn't pop music. I'm pop. I mean, of course I am. What isn't pop? There should be a pop amnesty where everyone reclaims it.
I think pop music was going through a phase where it was like pop but dance-hall or pop but R&B. But, no, I just want a pop song.
Well, I grew up in Hell's Kitchen, right next to Times Square, in a subsidized arts building.
In the little rural town I grew up in, I missed out on the pop music of the time, the '80s, and now enjoy in retrospect. It's as an adult that I've opened it up to dance, hip-hop, R&B, and even big pop songs.
I always wanted to merge heavy metal with pop music, but I think that because I grew up more with pop, the Beatles and the Stones, I tended to affiliate myself with those projects.
At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death.
I'm not going to do anything crazy, but I want to do music that I'm passionate about. I'm finally at an age where I can do the music that I grew up loving, which was urban pop, '90s music. I grew up listening to the divas, so I'm very happy to finally do urban pop. I hope that it's received well, and it has been so far.
We grew up with all the Fat Wreck Records and all the Epitaph bands, that era. We mixed it up together. We were never purists of being just pop or just pop-punk. We always wanted to blend everything that we love.
Food is a passion because I basically grew up in a kitchen. My mother was a gourmet chef and I'm the youngest of five kids. We would always congregate in the kitchen.
Shows like 'Top Chef,' 'Hell's Kitchen' have helped bring attention to the culinary world on a whole, but you have to be cautious it doesn't get out of hand.
There are times when you see the news, and you go, "How the hell am I meant to do anything tonight?" I'm not good at compartmentalizing myself and not being affected by the world around me, so it was very difficult for me when atrocious news stories would pop up. And I would think, "How the hell am I supposed to talk to the skeleton about the horse tonight?"