I'm a visual artist myself and always have been so it's very natural for me to be very concerned with presentation, whether it's artwork or onstage.
I've always cared about how certain songs fade into other ones and which songs should follow others. I studied that as a consumer and fan before I even got into music.
One of the main things that differentiates them [artists of 70s] from artists before is that they made albums based on the fact that they didn't care about the band as a thing in its own right. They cared about manipulating the recording and that became the album.
I remember thinking Democrats and liberals were the good guys. They cared about the little guy. They cared about poor people. They cared about minorities.
Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.
I actually was a good student, but I never applied myself 'cause I was always like, 'I don't love doing this.' I wasn't passionate about school. I always got a B just to pass. But what's crazy is I got a 29 on my ACT test without even studying. So I was always, like, just smart - but never really cared.
The customer is always right' may have become a standard motto in the world of business, but the idea that 'the audience is always right,' has yet to make much of an impression on the world of presentation, even though for the duration of the presentation at least, the audience is the speaker's only customer.
I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.
I never cared about buying things for myself, like clothes. And then all of a sudden I realized how great it is to be very precise about the shirts that I wear and all the things that are a part of my closet. So the ritual of fashion and shopping became very personal to me.
Even before I became a recording artist, I did other things in music. I was a teacher, I did studio work, and I was an arranger and a producer.
My grandmother knew nothing about sports. She still didn't even when I went to the NBA. She never really cared too much about sports. She only cared about me being a good person.
I also wanted my basketball players to know that I really cared about them. Forget basketball; as a person, I cared, I cared about their family.
Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist - it wasn't just about painting, it was about media and performance.
I only became a celebrity because I had a kid. Before I was pregnant nobody cared. I joke to my agent that having a baby made my career.
The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.
Before I became a leader, I thought success was all about building myself up. But then, once I became a leader, I realized that success is about building others up.