There's something that I can't describe about the city [Portland] that I really love - just physically - how it feels to walk around there, and have coffee there. Also, the way that it's a little overcast sometimes. Something about Portland just really resonated with me.
It wasn't about mechanics; it was about a feeling, wanting to give someone something, which in turn was really gratifying. That really resonated for me.
I have always had a strange relationship to Portland, Oregon. It's a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland. And not in the way Portlanders mean 'weird' in their slogan 'Keep Portland weird.'
'Straight Outta Compton' is not a story we didn't know about or anything like that, but it's just something that resonated really well... It had no choice but to explode.
Is Portland worse off than other cities? Is Portland really 'Tent City U.S.A.?' I want to be clear: The answer is no. While the homeless situation in Portland is significant and unacceptable, it is not unique.
There's something really easy and just somehow un-crowded about the Portland airport. Every time I go there I'm like, 'Why is this so easy and sweet?'
I moved to Portland because Modest Mouse is there. I didn't necessarily mean to live there permanently, but I've got a really good feeling for it. The sensibility there really suits me. I happened to have grown up in Manchester, a city that was a pretty cool place to be a musician. It's close to Portland in a lot of ways.
The blue collar milieu was something that I really understood and resonated with me and I thought was underrepresented in American cinema.
I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.
I took my first acting classes in Portland at Portland State University and the Portland Actors Conservatory.
Via social media, I reached out, asking about relationships, dreams, hopes, fears, the whole gambit, and the stories that really resonated with me, I wrote songs about.
I could've signed with a team after Portland cut me and just sat on the bench and collected paychecks, but that's not my style. That just seems really unethical. Besides, money doesn't matter to me. I've got enough money.
Prior to Elephant I'd taken about six years of acting classes in Portland, but there's not a huge market there. The only thing we have is commercial stuff, and that didn't really appeal to me. So this is really a dream come true.
Sometimes people hear that you help somebody or you said something that really resonated with them that they really needed to hear. Sometimes people get motivated to go and do stuff. That makes me feel really good because I feel like I'm affecting people in a good way.
I just wanted to move out of Portland to do something.
If somebody says 'singer-songwriter' to me, the first person I think of is James Taylor. There are plenty of modern singer-songwriters, but there is something about James Taylor that has always resonated with me.