A Quote by Blake Jenner

There were days on that show where I had to go in and record a song, then I had to rehearse the dance for that song, and then I had to go and shoot a separate scene. That would be one day. So yeah, it was about the value of time and being prepared, and not to freak out.
Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.
We were never a band that did 96 takes of the same thing. I had heard of groups that were into that kind of excess around that time. They'd work on the same track for three or four days and then work on it some more, but that's clearly not the way to record an album. If the track isn't happening and it creates some sort of psychological barrier, even after an hour or two, then you should stop and do something else. Go out: go to the pub, or a restaurant or something. Or play another song.
I would have to work on the song and figure out how they wanted the song done, because they're such high-intensity songs. We figure that out first, then I go back and listen to it and go over and rehearse stuff with it and try to get a feel for the words.
In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done.
The requests started coming in from other prisoners all over the United States. And then the word got around. So I always wanted to record that, you know, to record a show because of the reaction I got. It was far and above anything I had ever had in my life, the complete explosion of noise and reaction that they gave me with every song. So then I came back the next year and played the prison again, the New Year's Day show, came back again a third year and did the show.
I had been DJing a dance night in Brooklyn and witnessed the response people had to "The Devil's Dancers" - Oppenheimer's one hit song. All these young people were dancing to this amazing song, completely unaware of whether it was current or not. It was from 1982, but sounded very current. It made sense that a physical record should exist for this song again. It seemed the obvious choice to represent what Minimal Wave was going to be.
Some days I'll be like, "You know what? Why don't I go to my daughter's studio and make a song?!" And then I don't! I don't know if I would have all the time it takes to put into a song.
I was on 'Melrose' at a time where we had to all go home and be there at the same time when the show was on, or set your VCR. But that was a big thing, and people of my generation still talk about that. They remember where they were, at what point of their lives that show came, and then talking about it the next day.
I don't write from dreams because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.
I am so grateful for One Day At A Time, even though for years and years and years people would go, "Oh, you were on One Day At A Time." I [am on the show] for about seven months and then this haunts me for the rest of my life. No, I had no regrets.
I just wanted to do my own thing after The Murderdolls. The Murderdolls were so spread out all across the US that we couldn't just say, "Let's go rehearse." For us we had like four days to rehearse because everyone had to book flights, so we just never got as tight as most bands should be.
Well, Neighbours wanted to do a song on the show, and they asked me what songs I had. I told them I'd just written this song, called Born to Try, and I had just gone overseas and spoken to some people from Song about it.
You're not going to hit it every single time, and that's why, when I record an album, I do probably close to 50 songs. Each song I record has to get better. If it's not better than the last song that I made, it'll usually linger for a couple of months, and then it'll be put on the backburner, and then there'll be another song that I do, and then it often doesn't make it on the album.
I played a couple of ideas and then had this unusual texture underneath which was like this little granulated kind of pipe organ almost like a scratchy record which he started [inaudible] brilliantly. "Oh I love that song." And when things go fine, it's good. So he started loving that song and that song was used quite a lot in the movie which is very granulated stuff on the guitar.
You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday.
If you were a performer that only had an acoustic instrument, back in the day you couldn't hide behind your guitar pedals or the production or the vibe. There was performance and then there was the song, and that was all that you had.
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