A Quote by Valerie Simpson
Nobody in my family was musical. I had no idea you could be a songwriter and make a living at it. It was all discovery. It was all just thrown at me.
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I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it's not part of the musical mainstream anymore.
We've had musical stuff in the show [South Park] forever. That's mostly because Trey's a big musical fan, and he's a great songwriter. He's been writing songs his whole life. So since the beginning, we've always put a lot of musical moments.
Nobody living can ever stop me. As I go walking my freedom highway. Nobody living can make me turn back. This land was made for you and me.
I don't feel bound by the ebbs and flows of musical trends, or what's happening with new music in general. I always had a fascination with that sound. It's a mixture of the idea that something could be going wrong along with the idea of bending constrained, Westernized music out of tune. But because I wasn't copying an idea, and it just came from somewhere inside me, it felt like a birth of something that most people didn't understand at the time.
You see, it took me so long, it was such a struggle, to move myself out of musicals - because I had had a success, nobody wanted to allow me to direct a non-musical picture. It was so hard. And the only way I could get it going was to become a producer myself.
I come from a musical family. My dad was in a group in the 70s, The Hudson Brothers. Now he's a songwriter and producer. So, I just kind of grew up with music and it was something I always knew I wanted to do.
Now I'm not going to go, "Oh my God, what are people saying about me?" I had a choice to be a student and not become a model, and becoming a doctor was another one of my dreams. I had a choice between not becoming a singer or becoming a songwriter and writing behind the scenes; nobody would have seen me writing songs for other people. I had the choice of not marrying my man; we could have just been hidden lovers, but I couldn't cope with it. I had these choices to do all these things, so I'm not going to cry over a life which has been really lucky.
But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.
I had in effect been thrown out of graduate school because I was a lousy graduate student, and I had to find a job, and I took the first job that came along. It happened to be a management trainee job in a life insurance company, and I just stayed. It was always, mainly, the idea was that I would support myself as a writer, and I knew I would have to have some sort of work, and it didn't make a whole lot of difference to me what it was. I mean, I could have been a paper hanger or something for that matter.
I grew up with this idea that songwriters had a great job. My family was Irish Catholic, so if you became a priest or a songwriter, you were golden.
I grew up in this room filled with musical instruments, but most importantly, I had a family who encouraged me to invest in my own imagination, and so things I created, things I built were good things to be building just because I was making them, and I think that's such an important idea.
My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.
Most people might think that I've come from a musical background, but nobody in my family was in any kind of band or played anything. I just picked up music from breakdancing really, that's what got me to listen to music, and in general I was just a creative guy.
The idea that you could make a living from writing always thrilled me.
When I was living on the street I would be standing out in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, leaning against my car and signing autographs and nobody had any idea that I was living in it.
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