I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.
I don't like being pigeonholed. Why would you want to limit yourself to one style or one genre? Labels are something I want to avoid. I've had it my whole life, being pushed into a place, a circumstance or situation I didn't want to be in. My motivation has always been to get away from it.
I don't go to shows because I just want to listen to the music performed live. I want to get to know the person who's performing it. Or I want to, like, take away a sense that I had an experience that nobody else is going to have again, or a unique experience for that moment.
Tom Misch, I found him on a soul playlist.
There are musicians who want to make a living making music. There are listeners who want to listen to music. Complicating this relationship is a whole bunch of history: some of the music I want to listen to was made a while ago in a different economy. Some of the models of making a living making music are no longer valid but persist.
I roll out of bed in the morning, whenever I want, and I work right away because, to me, that's the life. That's freedom. The whole point for me is that I love the freedom of being an entrepreneur that I do what I want to do when I want to do it.
In the back of your mind you always want it to be successful and you want things to happen, but I've learned in my life that if you want something too much, even when it happens it may not be what you wanted if you set your expectations too high.
I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?
I tend to approach characters not based on ethnicity but on some unique individual qualities, and I've set my whole life that way. I don't want any sort of limitations imposed on my work. If you truly want to be a creative person, you can't limit yourself.
I believe when the music is being sung or being played, at the end of it, there's some sort of grace and understanding. And that's all I want for humanity. I just want us to understand each other. That's the point of my music.
Sometimes the best set experiences make for the worst films. So, you don't want it to be too good an experience! But the bulk of your life is working with people and collaborating so you don't want anyone to be miserable on your film either. You want it to be something that people walk away from saying that it was a good experience for them and hopefully a good film. As a director, you are sort of leader of that troupe for that period of time, so you're aware of morale and your effect - how you are as a person and how that sort of trickles down to everyone else.
I don't want to be the cliche American Idol dude. I want to be different, you know - that's the whole goal, me and music. It's about being yourself and being unique.
Our whole life is set up in the path of least resistance. We don't want to suffer. We don't want to feel discomfort. So the whole time, we're living our lives in a very comfortable area. There's no growth in that.
I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.
People tend to believe that I want to make soul music, which is not entirely untrue but, really, I want to be like the black Tom Waits - I don't want to make one kind of sound.
We want people to listen to records, to a whole body of music. I want you to buy into my life, not just one subject in my life.