I was in Kansas for about a month, and we worked most of the time in a very small town, so it felt like the production basically took the whole town over. In a way, we were the Martians in Kansas.
The Eternal Kansas City song came from a dream sequence. It was actually kind of weird. I had this dream about a Kansas City type of thing while I was up at Stevie Winwood's place near Cheltenham, in Britain. I went into this small town and I was walking along and this dream thing was still in my head.
Kansas City, well, part of the town's pretty cool, and part of the town is not. But it's gonna be that way no matter where you go.
First of all, I'm a Midwesterner, being from Kansas, and Chicago is basically a big Midwestern cow town. It was built from the stockyards, and everyone is very friendly, and it's at the edge of the tallgrass prairie. There's just a good feel to it.
A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.
I was born in a very small town in North Dakota, a town of only about 350 people. I lived there until I was 13. It was a marvelous advantage to grow up in a small town where you knew everybody.
People's outlook on Kansas City is always like, 'They let you rap in K.C.?' Or 'How's Dorothy and Toto?' They put Kansas and Kansas City together, when it's really separate.
I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
I feel so fortunate to have grown up in a town like Kansas City that has such a vibrant theater community.
Kansas City is truly an awesome town.
The first time that you escape from home or the small town that you live in - there's a reason a small town is called a small town: It's because not many people want to live there.
A lot of what I've written that's made its way onto my records I've written in Kansas, which is interesting because I've never written about Kansas. But I go have these experiences. and I'll be back at my parents house, and it's like I'm in a safe incubator.
If you look at any sitcom that you watch, if it takes place in, say, a small town in Massachusetts, and it's about the dynamics of the people in that town, the showrunner probably grew up in a town like that, witnessed things, and created content.
They were going crazy in Kansas. People were up to 9 p.m. I think that was the greatest thing to happen to Kansas since the eradication of the boll weevil.
I grew up in a small town in Kansas, so I love meeting the fans. Those are the people who spend time out of their day to watch the things that I've done, and I've gotten to do some great supernatural stuff - 'Teen Wolf' and 'The Gates' before that - so it's nice when I get to go to Comic-Con every year.
If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.
I credit Kansas City with my work ethic and learning from the amazing artists that are in that town.