During the preproduction when I'm shooting and then once we wrap we go away. And then the visual effects guys take over. And then they add all those little bits and pieces. They come up with ideas during the cut in the editing, and they said while would be really cool if we did this thing here where the blade pops out. So then you see the movie and say wow that's a really neat idea. I wish we would have thought of that.
When I met someone who I thought was really talented, I would just be like, Wow! How did you get that way? And I met a lot of people who would just do anything to claw their way to the top, and it was just shocking and awful for me to see that for the first time. And now I live in Manhattan so I have become desensitized to that.
Who dat dere's gunna beat dat team? Who Dat? Who dat?
On past records I usually did start with a story or an idea for a song and then write around it, but on Achilles' Heel I would just start writing and try to let the song and my sub-conscience determine the direction. which is a goofy way of saying I tried not to decide before hand what the song and or the characters would do and be like.
Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.
When my publicist told me I was going to be in 'People''s Ones to Watch as Maybelline's honoree, at first I was in shock. Then I thought, 'Wow. This is really happening.' I just feel so happy and honored that they would choose a boy in beauty.
As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.
For the first records I really never thought about anything other than the song itself. I thought that this was what the job of a songwriter was. I was really approaching music from a very different standpoint. To me when I was younger the song was just the melody. I think as I've gotten older and have been recording myself I've become aware of just how many layers can exist within a song besides just the main vocal.
I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn't remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn't trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like "Wow, it's a tune."
I loved Rent when I first heard it, but it grew on me and so did Tick, Tick... Boom. Some songs are more interesting than others and sometimes the ones that never stood out at first end up being the best to perform.
I started in Shakespeare. I'm classically trained, which, how hilarious is that? Then one night, I saw Second City and thought, 'Wow, that's what I want to do.' But I never thought it would morph into screenplay writing.
How often have I tried just hard enough so that I can then say to myself that I tried with the real purpose of assuaging my guilt about something I did not wish to succeed in the first place?
When I recorded my first album, my ego didn't let me believe that what I was gonna say on the mic, anyone would really care about. But then when I found out that they did, I started to take it more seriously.
A song like 'Shooting Star' - the thought process behind writing that song was that I looked around and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of people dying at that time in the music business.'
In all honesty I think, sometimes with the LGBT community, if you look at anything else surrounding it, there's always been this oddness and sense of humor. I really appreciate that. It's kind of a hard world to take yourself too seriously. It's a good balance check. It's not serious all the time. I'm that way too, even though I write a lot of depressing music. A lot of times our shows are not very serious at all. We joke a lot and then we play a sad song and then we joke again.
That's really what was wonderful for me growing up, since I got to know so many of the songwriters who liked me and thought I had talent. They would then tell me how to read a lyric and sing a song, and challenge me to try and find a different end to a song.