When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.
Music was a big outlet for me. Being able to play an instrument and sing was definitely a good way for me to escape things I was dealing with: family issues, growing up, being a kid and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
I was big as a kid, very overweight. That caused a lot of insecurities for me growing up, and on top of that, I didn't like the idea of big crowds. I found it quite frightening. I enjoy the company of people who I know, and I'm probably still like that today.
Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.
It's basically against the whole idea of what always made rock&roll music interesting to me. I thought it was an unassailable outlet for some pure and natural expressions of rebellion. It was one channel you could take without havin' to kiss ass, you know? And right now it just seems like they're on a big daisy chain, each kissin' each other's asses.
But I feel like I developed my own love for hip-hop and rap music by myself. Just growing up and hearing new things. As you grow up, you begin to listen to new music that this kid is listening to, then you begin to like your own music, and start discovering it yourself.
I guess rebelliousness has been explored in many movies, but what about the smart kids' rebellion? Not just the motorcycle jackets and that kind of rebellion; it's the dorky kid - what could he do?
For me, my voice and music was always an outlet. Growing up in an unstable environment and whatnot, music was my only real escape.
I think my writing has an old-fashioned feel to it for whatever reason. I'm just so influenced by the music that I listened to growing up, a lot of it out of the '60s, so it has a natural tendency to feel like it's from another era.
Growing up with music as a kid - I used to feel like artists were writing songs about me falling in love.
I was a big kid my whole life. I grew up among big people. My brother was a big kid. I didn't really feel like a big kid. Except for the teachers, who pretty much didn't want me to squish any of the other kids.
Today, kids are much more aware of what fashion means, but when I was growing up, it was popular, but not as popular as today. Like any kid, I was fascinated by drawing. But when some of the kids let go, I kept drawing and drawing.
Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.
After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavours and from there it just blossomed. I have always had to have an outlet for my creativity and when my life became more about raising my family than the bright lights of show business exploring my photo art was a great outlet for me.
After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. I have always had to have an outlet for my creativity and when my life became more about raising my family than the bright lights of show business exploring my photo art was a great outlet for me.
There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today.
A real good artist is basically a grown-up kid, who never kills the kid. What we call being an adult is basically about killing the kid. People think you have to forget about the kid to become an adult and deal with grown-up problems. But, that's bullshit. We are still kids. It's the same, you just grow up. You're a kid with more experience.