I have a passion for ballad. . . . They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,--in the genial Summertime.
I sang my song called "In This Song." David Foster wrote the song for me. I thought that I should sing a ballad song.
I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.
I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
Summertime where guys played pickup, we got a thing in Philly called Summertime Rec. In that summertime you can't duck no smoke. You can't duck nobody in that basketball vibes.
It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.
Bike lanes are clearly controversial. And one of the problems with bike lanes - and I'm generally a supporter of bike lanes - but one of the problems with bike lanes has been not the concept of them, which I support, but the way the Department of Transportation has implemented them without consultation with communities and community boards.
For 'tis green, green, green, where the ruined towers are gray, And it's green, green, green, all the happy night and day; Green of leaf and green of sod, green of ivy on the wall, And the blessed Irish shamrock with the fairest green of all.
I wrote a song with Kara DioGuardi called 'What If,' and it's a really beautiful song. It's kind of like a rock ballad. There's a lot of guitars and drums in it.
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.
This speaker reminds me of my childhood in Budapest. There were gypsy magicians who came to town to entertain us children. But as I recollect, there was one important difference: the gypsy only seemed to violate the laws of nature, he never really violated them!
During the summertime, I really like to dress like a gypsy. I love that whole lifestyle and the whole mixing of fabrics and flowy materials.
Besides my fast and slooow songs, I further divide my work into three main song types: the ballad or story song, the variation on a theme (saying the same thing over and over and over again) song, and the weird song. It's important to have weird songs, but I find that a little weirdness goes a long way.
Too many musicians rush through everything with too many notes. I need time to take the picture. A ballad should be a ballad. It's important to understand what the song is saying, and learn how to tell the story. It takes time. I can't rush it. I really can't rush it.
You can only have one first born child. You may love all your children deeply and with passion, but there is something unique about the first born.
A rule against paid fast lanes would encourage additional capacity; a rule permitting paid fast lanes would simply encourage cable companies to create congested slow lanes on the Internet so they could make money by selling fast lanes to big companies.
I've been such a gypsy in my life because I was born in northern England and grew up there until I was 16. But I'm 31 now, so I've lived almost half my life in so many other countries that I don't really know what nationality I am. I mean, I've got a British passport and an American green card, but I don't know where I'm from anymore.