I was so used to doing old blues licks with the first three fingers. When I started using my pinky and finding more spread things, that's when I started getting my own style.
I started doing modeling and continued for good three to four months and then I started getting Kannada movies. Then I realized that I really want to try getting into acting. A lot of people started saying that have 'I have a Bollywood face.'
I started writing when I was around 6. I say 'writing,' but it was really just making up stuff! I started writing and doing my own thing. I didn't really know what a demo was or anything like that, so I started getting interested in studio gear and started learning about one instrument at a time. My first instrument was an accordion.
In a way, it [my style] is an homage. But I didn't really know about it at first. But then when I started living in Berlin in the early '90s, I started getting ID and Dazed and Confused. I was shocked how close things were to my work.
Real estate was one of the first things I was doing. I kinda like mistakenly fell into that. I bought a house early in my career, and in my head, it was like, if everything goes wrong, I own this one house, you know... As I started doing concerts and more concerts, I started buying more houses.
Tak Fujimoto and I, when we started getting enough of a budget where we could afford the right lenses - 'cause we started out doing low-budget pictures together - we started experimenting with this subjective camera thing. And we kind of fell in love with the idea of using that as our close-up.
When I started going to school, I started getting used to things, like the language. After that, I started adapting to school, friends, and everything. It was really difficult, to start with, but I survived.
All of the sudden the audiences started getting younger and the spread of the attendance was really wide. I think it's as a result of the records selling more that they started following our careers.
I've grown up with a piano in the house, and that's where I started to be able to learn things by ear. Guitar kind of happened, and I was using it just for writing at first. Then, I was writing so much that I began to realise that I knew how to play, and that's when I started getting nerdy about it.
When I first started out, I was really attracted to having my own sense of style because I started swing dancing, lindy hop, and jitterbug.
I started when Chris Rock did 'Bigger & Blacker.' I used to watch that before I went onstage as inspiration to get hype, but I noticed I started taking on his cadence and talking like him. I was also doing the New York-style comedy thing, which was angry and annoyed. I was creating a persona instead of trying to embrace my own.
A lot of people don't know this, but I started out as a blues-based player, and then, when I realized after playing 18 hours a day that there's more than five notes per scale, that's when my stuff became what it was. I started listening to violinists and flautists, and that's how my style evolved.
It wasn't until I went to college that I started getting interested in style. Then I got jobs that started to pay a bit more money and was able to afford some nice slacks and suits.
I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I've still been doing it.
'Game of Thrones' was the first fantasy thing I've done, and like a lot of people who enjoy the show watching it, I didn't expect to respond to that world, but when I started doing it, I really started to love it, started to realize that some of the things I'm naturally drawn to.
When I first started out on the soap, I was more theatrical, like a stage actor, a little bigger than life. As I did more and more Love Of Life, I became more natural. I learned the value of underplaying. It was a great training ground for me. There was a big difference in my style of acting from where I started with that show and where I ended, and where I ended was a good jumping-off point for doing nighttime television and movies.
I love to learn, and I started doing a lot of studying of Spanish-style music and really started getting into it and how it is just a completely different form of guitar playing. It is just like if you started speaking in a different language like Japanese or something. It is something that you have to study and work at a lot.