When I turned thirteen, I moved up to the junior bull scale. They didn't really classify them by how big they were but how bad they were. The first time I got on one of the big boys I was absolutely terrified but excited at the same time.
The Beatles were so big that it's hard for people not alive at the time to realize just how big they were.
You guys got big uglies, fuumm-bull, and 'Whoa, Nellie.' What I got was, 'Lindsey, why are the trash cans still out front?' 'This homework needs more work,' and the inevitable was, 'How fast were you really going?'
Requests for mustache rides were the big common theme, around the time of the release of the season. People were saying how much they hated him, obviously, and how they would kill him or choke him. There were just all kinds of things. You name it, I got it.
Music has always been something I wanted to do. I think just the idea of performing and entertaining and being in the studio is really what I wanted to know how that felt. I started to get into it around the same time I got into acting, but it turned into a side project because my movies were taking up most of my time.
My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.
I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.
Around 10, I got chubby. I knew I'd crossed a line when the only pants that fit were from the 'Junior Plenty' line at JC Penny. My parents had split up, my mom was going through a dark time, and my brother and I were getting bullied in our new neighborhood. Life was big and unsafe.
How many boys like him were out there in the ether, holding on to their big brothers and sisters who were still alive? How many husbands were floating between life and death, clinging to their wives in this world? And how may millions and millions of people were there in the world like Charlie who wouldn't let go of their loved ones when they're gone?
What happened on "As Cool As I Am" was, you know how in the `90s, "the personal is political, the political is personal"? That was a really big thing. Choices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.
The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time.
The whole first movie [Twilight] was pretty fun. I had never really done a movie like it, when there's such a big cast of people that are around about the same age. Everyone didn't really know what was going to happen with the movie, but there was a good energy. There was something which people were fighting for, in a way. They wanted it to be something special. None of us were really known then, as well. It felt like a big deal, at the time.
By climbing mountains we were not learning how big we were. We were finding out how breakable, how weak and how full of fear we are.
The first wave of the Internet was really about data transport. And we didn't worry much about how much power we were consuming, how much cooling requirements were needed in the data centers, how big the data center is in terms of real estate. Those were almost afterthoughts.
When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble.
The first time I moved to L.A., I was there for five months, and my health got so bad because of how depressed I was.
I think the big thing for Simple Plan is that we were able to keep the band members, the same five guys, the same lineup from the start. That's not easy. We grew up together. We're friends. We come from the same world. We've always had the same dreams and goals. I think we realized, as the years go by, how precious it is to have that, to build that, to see so many bands break up... it makes us realize how different we are to all that. We're really proud of that.