I was trying to find an original style that didn't sound like Tony Bennett or anyone else. So I prayed about it, woke up with this high voice, and by 1954, I was going to amateur nights and winning.
You would have thought that as you got older the voice would tend to deteriorate in some ways, but I always look at somebody like Tony Bennett, who is my senior, and still can hit those high notes and still can belt it out as good as he ever did. So it must be something about the voice that's unlike the rest of the muscles in your body.
The reason I put make-up on or wear the costume is to try and find my own style. It's like my guitar style - I'm just trying to be an original artist.
As far as entertainers, I know I'll sound like a cliché but they don't make 'em, like they use to. Barbra Streisand is one of them, also Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. The first theater voice I heard on a record was Ethel Merman and again, they just don't make them like that anymore.
We hope, for anyone else trying to make a dream come true, they can find the faith to keep going in 'Fly' when they're about to give up.
When I can make music and don't have to think about anyone else's ideas or voice - when I'm making something that only I can make - it feels good. It's nice when you can find a sound that only you can make. No one else can make 'Cosmogramma.' No one else can make 'Until the Quiet Comes.'
It's not an act. I love it. It's totally original. People go, 'What's going on with this guy? Why does he sound so weird? What is going on in his brain. I don't know. Just one day I suddenly woke up with a new brain.
The sound of 'Take Her Up to Monto' and 'Hairless Toys' is the sound of me and the producer in the studio doing whatever we like. There is no reference. It's too easy to be referential now; I'm trying to find something else.
Tony Bennett and me are all the same... and he's still singing. I don't know what else to do.
I'm a piano player. I never thought of myself as a singer, at all. I was always trying to sound like somebody else. I don't like my own voice, I like Ray Charles, Robert Plant, I like Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, people that have an edge in their voice.
Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.
My style of fighting is to go down and trying to finish the guy and trying to end fights, not laying up because I'm winning the fight, just keep going after it.
We're going to have another rude awakening, a war or depression where people are going to have to value one another again and not value money and winning alone. On the political environment we now have a President who likes winning and money and he represents aspects of the spectacle we were alluding to, and yet he's my President and I am for anyone who is my President. I'm an American and yet it's the style thing. We’ll see what happens. He’d like to see things work well and trying to get us to that place as a country.
My voice doesn't sound like anyone else's. I wanted to sound like my favorite singers when I was young because when you're young you don't put much value on uniqueness. But later I realized I had something special to offer.
I was never much of a singer. I was terrible. It's embarrassing: I was trying to sound like everybody else. I went through a big Cure phase, so I was trying to do that kind of dramatic voice.
The greatest thing anyone can do for God and for man is to pray. You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed. Prayer is striking the winning blow ... service is gathering up the results.
I remember this one time I had a dream about me writing a screenplay, and when I woke up, you know those dreams that feel so real, but I woke up and I was like, 'Oh my god I have this amazing screenplay I need to write down as soon as I wake up' and then I woke up and I was like what the heck was I dreaming of?