Hot Boyz always shouted out a lot of things relevant to Texas so I connected with it. They were our neighbors and growing up we went to Louisiana every year for Mardi Gras, Bayou Classic and the Essence festival, so we grew up taking trips to Lafayette and New Orleans. Those were three annual trips.
I grew up camping with my family. We took so many trips. We had an RV, actually, when we were growing up. We did a ton of camping trips and went across the country.
It was awesome growing up in New Orleans because there were great metal bands, there were great hardcore bands, there were great thrash metal bands in the middle '80s and what-not. But then, take me out of New Orleans, and I moved to Fort Worth in 1987, and there's a scene there, too. And Texas absolutely has a different sound.
Just being from Louisiana, being from the southern part of Louisiana, Metairie, close to New Orleans and growing up in St. Rose. There are a lot of things to overcome.
I live in New Orleans part of the year, and it's a really fun eating town. I bought two homes there, one to live in and one as an investment. They love to eat, drink and dress up in costumes. There are so many reasons to dress up - Mardi Gras, Halloween, Southern Decadence.
My family's business was actually an amusement park in New Orleans. My grandfather had started that, and my grandmother was a dance maven in New Orleans. It was just the theatricality and the Mardi Gras and the pageantry that I fell in love with at an early age.
As a young person growing up in Washington, D.C., summers were hot, humid and relentless. My friends and I grew more restless and adventurous with every passing year.
In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact.
Growing up, my parents were Roman Catholic - strict Catholics - from New Orleans. I understood the idea in the principle of spirituality. I noticed it in the stories that I read. The Trinity was something that was brought up consistently: the power of three. Things happened in threes, and I thought that was brilliant.
When I was a kid, I saw Mardi Gras in New Orleans. So to me Party Rock was always wear your animal print, bring your no-lenses glasses, dress up in a bunch of colors and have fun. Animal print is a must.
Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue in New Orleans on Mardi Gras = bad idea!
I'm from New Orleans, and we have a Mardi Gras group called the Chewbacchus. It's celebrating all things geeky: science fiction, fantasy, 'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who,' 'Men in Black,' 'Ghostbusters,' everything.
I took several trips to New Orleans and met with people who had intimate knowledge of the underbelly of the city in the 1950s. The meetings were both fascinating and terrifying.
When you get into Louisiana, it really is like a different country in a lot of ways. The plants you see are a little different, like the weeping willows and the cypress trees that come up out of the bayou. And it's steamy hot.
My grandparents would take me out fishing in their boat once a week from when I was about two or three, growing up in in Texas and Louisiana. I loved it.
In New Orleans, bounce music was prevalent. That was all they wanted to hear. It was new and trendy, and it was hot, and it was taking off. Artists were coming out of everywhere. They did some great songs, some really catchy, fun songs. That was just the feel of New Orleans music.
Australia is an island surrounded by water. My fondest memories growing up were trips to the beach, walking around the harbor and playing in the beautiful parks.