We had a great childhood and boyhood. It was a wonderful time through those years. A lot of it was through the Depression years, when things were tough, but my dad always had a job. But I had a great time. I was kind of restless, and I had a hard time staying in school all day, so me and a few pals would duck out and go out on these various adventures.
I've sort of remarried a few years ago and have had a couple more children in the last couple of years. And so home life is taking up a lot of my time.
I’ve basically been working really hard for the past couple years. And the nature of the film business is that movies come out when they come out, and these all just happen to be coming out at the same time.
A lot of groups go out, and they make big bucks in a couple of years and they're gone. I would like a band that's sustaining.
I had come out of retirement into a very difficult situation with the PeopleSoft takeover, got through it, and was having a good time, frankly. We just ran out of runway at PeopleSoft. Had we had another year, maybe two years, I think we would have made it.
Honestly, it takes a lot of dedication and sacrifice. When I was trying to get better a couple years ago, I was not going out. I had a couple of people get mad at me. I wasn't going out and partying, I was just doing what I had to do to get better.
I started to play the guitar for a couple of years, which was fun. I still bring it out once in a while, could bust out a couple of songs, but I'm not very good at it.
I had gone through a mother having dementia in the last couple of years of her life. She was in a nursing facility in my little hometown area of northern Illinois, so I got to see a lot of other patients there in various stages of the disease. I had a firsthand exposure to it in a pretty big way.
Today they forget you in five years. They give an artist nowadays four or five years and that's it. Some of them don't have that. They get a couple of releases. If you don't sell two million copies, you're gone, you're out of here.
My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.
When I started having a couple of beers and loosening up, I realized how many years I had wasted going back to my hotel room alone when I could have gone and just had a beer or two.
I did love the glamour of going out and had a couple of years when there was a lot of make-up and false eyelashes.
The music business has changed so much. Collaborations are all over the Internet. The young people are keeping the old school alive. A lot of them run out of ideas so they grab these songs that we've had out for 50 years and bringing them back and making people rich again. That's a nice thing. A lot of artists don't have incomes after a certain time in their life because nobody's is buying the songs. This revival of their music has taken a lot of writers out of the poor house.
I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that. I'd been an actor in high school, and when I got to college, it was all about film.
Very intense first summer out, to be 18 years old and never having gone on a date, never having smoked a cigarette, never had a drink, even a sip of beer, never kissed a girl, all of those things. It made for a fairly intense first year out.
I didn't try out for bands when I was younger. I got into guitars intensely a couple of years into playing so much by the time I was graduating high school I was accepted into Berklee College of Music.