Changi for me - of course it's easy to be wise after the event, and to discuss it cleverly after the event - was about as near as you can get to being dead and still be alive.
Bill Monroe is not singing about life in America. He's singing about life in Kentucky and Tennessee. And yet it's had this tremendous impact, not just in America but in the world. Why is Bill Monroe's hyper-regional music so universal? We can be so different and yet still share a tremendous amount.
What keeps me motivated to create new music is the joy of songwriting. The joy of being creative. The joy of writing a poem or essay. Writing anything. I just love writing, whether it is music or words. I just didn't need to share it for the last 18 years. When you share it, it brings on other things, which is good.
We didn't know what the reception was going to be when we walked out on the runway, but it felt like we were in a rock band. People started cheering. It was a nice way to begin Zoolander 2, with that kind of reception.
To me, singing is basically a form of prayer. I get this great joy when I`m singing - whatever I`m singing. I missed it when I left it.
You never know what you're going to share. I can play, I know what is written - the marks, the things the composer tells me to do - and I do it, but it will still sound different each day.
One thing that brings everyone together are the lyrics. Even if the people singing don't know the Japanese words, they still sing along.
But I think there's a genuine joy, too, a sense that no matter what, even if my stomach's growling, I'm going to dance. That's what I want to leave people with at the end of the play. After all this, people still know how to live.
My work is incredibly important to me personally. It brings me joy and it brings me life and it brings me meaning. It doesn't necessarily have to be important to the people who read it.
When I started in the theater, the joy for me was playing different parts, and I get set alight by different people and different worlds. The biggest joy for me is jumping around and going from that to this to that, never feeling that I'm any one thing - because I'm not, and we as people aren't.
If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something. Or, you have to be singing in a vocabulary that has tremendous appeal or else people are not going to want to sit there for eighty or ninety minutes hearing this stuff.
For me, there's a tremendous challenge of singing with Faith, who, in my opinion is one of the best singers in the world. She doesn't get enough credit for being as good as she is. She's so beautiful that people look past her singing. But for a journeyman like me to keep up with her is a real tough sprint.
Singing brings out in me what I can't normally bring out in everyday life. It's an incredible feeling to be able to bare your soul to people you've never met in a way that can make them understand so clearly what you mean. That's what I love most about singing ... it becomes my truest form of communication.
My first experience of that was with my first movie which I did in India. And it was so different from other people. I find that "Oh my God." Every time the music is slow I feel that people are going to get up and go out. You get this nervousness. But, to my surprise, people starting singing the song even before it came in. They started singing along a week later, after release, which was very cool.
Every day I remind myself of all that I have been given... With singing, you never know when you are going to lose the voice, and that makes you appreciate the time that you have when you are still singing well. I am always thanking God for another season, another month, another performance.
They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.