A Quote by John Petrucci
The only thing I had in my mind [when I was 17 ] was that I was going to be a professional musician. So it was just the right environment.
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Nobody thought that I could become a professional. I was not that good. It was really just one thing I had fun doing. But it was never realistic for me to become a professional until I became 17 or maybe 18.
I always tell my students when you're going to be a jazz musician the first thing you've got to do is be a professional musician, and that means you have to feed yourself with the instrument.
In high school, my first thing ever was I played Tony in West Side Story when I was about 17. I was a really shy kid and I just like forced myself to learn how to sing this one month because I loved West Side Story so much and I somehow managed to get the role. I had an afro and glasses, and the guy who cast me goes, "All right, the first thing to go is the afro and the next thing, I'm going to buy you contacts and we're going to get you..." So he kind of molded me into what it had to - that's still probably the hardest role I've every played in anything, the most taxing role.
My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room. This system has just worked for me, even though I've had to sweat over every word. It's just my style.
The Beatles just changed everything right across the board. They just had that right combination of clean-cut good looks - a cute band - but under that they had a real rock n roll thing going on.
The Beatles just changed everything right across the board. They just had that right combination of clean-cut good looks - a cute band - but under that they had a real rock n' roll thing going on.
I said '17 - right now, this year, "'17 is going to be a disaster." I'm very good at this stuff.
There are always going to be people that are judgmental that are going to say, 'Well, he was an actor first, so he doesn't have the right to be a musician,' or, 'I know him as this, so therefore I will never accept him as that.' I can't change those people. I can only be myself. And I can only keep making art. I can only do the best that I can. I am not going to spend my life trying to silence the critics. I'm going to do what I'm passionate about and follow my dreams.
It's was all the internet. I started writing songs in high school, right about the time of the onset of Napster. I went to college in Dallas, and when I'd get back from class I'd have fans emailing me from different areas of the country asking when the album was going to be out and when I was going on tour. It was crazy, because I didn't even consider myself a professional musician.
The only thing that was in my mind when we made that first phone call was, 'Is it going to work?' We had all these parts hand soldered together, engineers standing by with the soldering iron - just in case.
Going to college helped me, because I had four years in the conservatory program, which is close as you can get to a professional environment. It's like all day.
I just kind of went into the blue-collar workforce at a really young age and discovered music, in terms of being a musician, around the same time. The good news is, I was probably 17 when I knew that's what I was going to do with the rest of my life, no matter what that meant.
My dad was a professional musician; my mom played, too, but just for fun. All my siblings played. The house was full of music books, videos, albums. I guess it's not surprising that I ended up becoming a musician.
When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician.
The real key is to live in an environment where the mind feels free to choose the right thing instead of being compelled by habit and inertia to choose the wrong thing.
The only thing I've ever wanted to do is play professional football, and be a professional quarterback, so now that it's here and it's getting close, it's just kind of making all that pain and suffering and waiting and working hard worth it.
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