I was tossed all over the place growing up, which I guess prepared me for the music business, but the one thing that has always been there, that has never ever left me, has been country music.
Country music was the music I was brought up on. It's the music that's closest to my heart and the music that speaks to me the most, and it's always been a big influence on my own songwriting.
... coming to a place like Nashville, which is just music music music, it's always been such an influence on me. And there are so many interesting songwriters out there, and it's such a crazy business and so many people are trying to do it, and it's all right there in Nashville.
If you listen to soul music, or R&B music, or Blues music, a lot of that came from church music and spiritual music, and music has always been a really really powerful tool that people have used to get them closer to God - whatever they define God as. And for me that's always been part of what drew me to it and keeps me coming back for more.
Music has always been an important thing to me in my life and understand I've worked in the music business.
That's really always been the music that I've been in love with, always the music that I've written growing up. Even through Pentatonix, folk music has been really my heart and soul.
All I do is listen to music. It's a weird thing. It's like I have so much catching up to do. I've always been over my head. That's just the way I work best, you know. Like when you're studying for school you think, "I can only study when I have to study the night before." That kind of means you're lazy or you're a procrastinator, but for me with music it's a similar thing. It's like I've been over my head for most of my career so to speak.
My life has always been full of music..My father was a concert promoter when I was a kid so music has always been a part of my life growing up, furthering my desire to do music when I was old enough to create it on my own.
When I heard Elvis Presley, then I knew I had to do music. Music is my god, and is the only love that has never left me. It has always been there and is my best friend.
I don't need to be any place else, because the music takes me to the only place I want to be right now. To the place where I am and have always been wholly me, the only church I've ever belonged to, the only place I've ever prayed.
Music has always been a visual thing to me, so writing and drawing the 'Skin&Earth' comics, which tie cohesively with the music, was an obvious move for me as an artist.
I guess it's kind of the obvious thing for me to do 'cuz it's what I grew up listening to. The songs growing up and everything kind of seem like old music to them, but to me, it's just... good music. And of course I did grow up in England in the 21st Century and that does come into it as well.
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
I don't think there is anyone I've ever met who has been more passionate about music than me, but rock 'n' roll has never been about just music. It is music, attitude, personality, persona, myth, legend.
I've never been passionate about just music, I've never seen myself going into music in that sense. My love for music has always been connected to the stories told through music, which is why I was drawn to theater and why I think 'Glee' is so powerful.
I call this my church house trilogy. Souls' Chapel really was music from the Mississippi Delta, which to me is a church within itself. The Delta is the church of American Roots music. The Badlands is a cathedral without a top on it. And the Ryman has been called the Mother Church of Country Music, but to me it's the Mother Church of American Music. If you can think it up, it's been done there. In my mind, this is kind of a spiritual odyssey as much as anything else, and I had the settings of three churches to make it in.
I've always been a lover of classical music ever since I was an early teenager I suppose. I remember the very first piece of classical music that grabbed me was I bought an LP of Daniel Barenboim performing Mozart's piano concertos and I would have been about 14 or 15 at the time and I remember I played it over and over again.