When The B-52s started in the late '70s, music and the business was totally different. Obviously, it's easier for everyone to be able to work with music, record, and get good quality.
I started as a writer. I didn't play music until late in life.
I started in the late 70s, beginning of the 80s, and I think I started to sing and make music as a therapy for myself; I never planned to be an artist; sometimes when I think about it it's crazy that I'm here, and I'm touring, and I'm doing what I'm doing.
I was a bit late on Erykah Badu, but I don't think you can really be late on music. You discover it whenever; music is timeless.
I always say to people that I left hip-hop in '97, meaning that I departed from listening to predominately hip-hop and just started really getting into records from the late '60s, early '70s. And once I made that change, I realized how much great music was made back in the day, and it started to become apparent how much we've lost in music.
For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.
I'm a fan of all music, and probably my first - well, not the very first music I listened to, but back in the late fifties, when I first started hearing rock & roll, it was definitely tinged with doo wop and also Elvis and all those great songs.
I got into one of the Scottish classical styles called piobaireachd, which is a very old music that started around the 1700s or something. I really got into this music. After that, I started to compose bagpipe music in my notations. Then I started building bagpipes by myself, and then I started to perform with the instrument myself in the 1980s.
I started when I was really young. I was playing classical music when I was 4 and when I turned 11 I started to write pop music. I guess you could say it was my intellectual evolution and my love of music began to change.
The way I like to think about it is, even though I started music early - I started in classical music - it wasn't until I discovered jazz that I really fell in love with music and realized this was what I wanted to do for a living.
And EDM music grabbed my ear and got my attention and I started realizing that the computer was, in the same way that the saxophone was invented in the late 1800s and guitar in the 1930s, an instrument.
I started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty.
I started growing late, so I was a late developer.
Music came first and I started to jam with people I couldn't communicate in their language. Then, because I could make friends thanks to music, they started to talk to me. Then I started to learn English.
I wanted to play rocking country music, and when I started out in the late Seventies, it took me a couple of albums to figure out how to do that.
There are things I'm never late for. I'm not late for the theater; I'm not late for the movies; I'm not late if my single girlfriend is at a bar somewhere. But if I'm on vacation in Mexico with a bunch of cackling hens, then I'm going to be late for dinner - count on it.