I love attempting to play real people. I like to try and have dramatic moments as well as comedic moments, and my favorite thing is when those two lines are blurred.
I love to play humorous moments in dramatic shows. That's always the most fun: to keep the logic of the character in a show that's basically action-adventure and then play the comedy moments.
I like stories with a collision of disparate tones. Look at 'Shameless' or 'House of Lies'. They go from big, silly, and comedic to very real dramatic moments in the wink of an eye.
You get to have some bigger comedic moments with some very real dramatic stuff. All that in one makes for a fulfilling artistic job.
For me, the most gratifying part in touring is singing the songs that I know tmy fans love, it's those moments when they put their hands up and their heads down that you know that you have hit a nerve. It's those moments when the people in the audience say "sang". It's those moments that I'd listen to growing up, even on Donny Hathaway live, where the people were speaking to my Dad at the Troubadour and I used to wonder, 'wow, what are they talking about?' There's an electricity that cannot be rivaled when you are creating for people live and in real time.
In a film, there are dramatic moments and a bunch of different moments that lead up to a dramatic moment. On some songs, I try to paint the picture of before that drama happens, so by the time you get to the end of the project you've experienced infatuation and intimacy before it dives off to drama.
When people are like, 'Life is good,' I go, 'No, life is a series of disastrous moments, painful moments, unexpected moments, and things that will break your heart. And in between those moments, that's when you savor, savor, savor.'
I don't seem to have any real strategy or pattern when it comes to love... At times I've been really guarded and careful and afraid to trust someone. But other times, you want to jump in headfirst. I've had moments of thinking, this is who I love and I don't care what anyone says. Those moments are beautiful and wild and exciting, but I've learned that those moments can end up hurting you in the end. I've been careful in love. I've been careless in love. And I've had adventures I wouldn't trade for anything.
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.
We love super-silly moments, funny moments, serious moments, weird moments.
Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.
We're all real people with moments of intense honesty and pathos and humanity. We all experience that, whether you're comedic or not.
People love miracle stories and dramatic moments of transcendence or transformation, and may then pursue their own dramatic "awakenings."
The great amount of fun that I have is I can cast dramatic actors to play comedic roles, and I can cast comedic actors to play dramatic roles because, really, there's no such thing. There's just actors.
It's those moments, those odd moments that you look for and sometimes by creating this kind of loose atmosphere you find those little moments that somehow mean a lot to an audience when they really register right.
There are moments of high mood, there are moments of low mood, there are moments of injury, there are moments of strength, there are moments of progress, there are moments of stagnation. All we can do is keep on pushing.
My favorite thing about guitar, and the thing that always drew me to it when I was first learning to play it, was those moments when you think you know what it might sound like, but you don't, and then you hit it, and it's a total surprise. You hear it with really fresh ears. Alternate tunings, for me, they give that back.