I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.
Ask any successful person, and most will tell you that they had a person who believed in them... a teacher, a friend, a parent, a guardian, a sister, a grandmother. It only takes one person, and it doesn't really matter who it is.
I can never understand how a solo could ever be 'uncool.' Play something good, and it won't be uncool, you know?
My mother's the most special person in my life ... I consider her my MVP: Most Valuable Parent.
All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.
The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren't always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I've come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as 'lame.'
It's almost like living a double life where I'm in a limbo space where Amanda Knox, a real person, exists, 'Foxy Knoxy,' an idea of a person, exists, and I'm constantly having to juggle how someone is interacting with me based upon that two-dimensional person of me that has been in the public's imagination for so long.
My own son feels I'm uncool but my grandson loves me. Being cool or uncool is a generational thing. But as a personal thing, I really love everybody in sight.
I was never the cool kid in school, and loads of people told me that I was weird, that I dressed uncool and did uncool things, that I was too nice, too happy.
All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.
I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds.
I named my album 'So Uncool' because it defies the ordinary: you're different from everyone else. It's like, being uncool makes you cool because you're different!
If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.
What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent.
Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people.
The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard.