I am very close to my family. I have learned a lot from my father. He used to tell me to be honest with yourself and not to argue with your seniors. You don't need to be involved in any quarrel, as sometimes you need to remain silent intelligently.
I am very close to my family. I have learned a lot from my father. He used to tell me to be honest with yourself and not to argue with your seniors. You dont need to be involved in any quarrel, as sometimes you need to remain silent intelligently.
I was very fortunate that a teacher saw that I read a lot and got bored very easily and had a lot of energy, so she said, 'You've got to go to this youth theater.' I joined Manchester Youth Theatre when I was really young, and I just loved putting on and being involved in plays and telling stories.
I taught myself to read music at a very young age, so when I started to take lessons in school, the teachers used to give me other instruments to keep me busy, because I was more advanced than the other kids.
A lot of music influences me in other ways than this, but I've always taken a lot of influence from Stevie Wonder, Frank Ocean, and Jeff Rosenstock for the Rex music. They were also the first three artists that released albums where I enjoyed every song.
I'm really pretty much a regular person who just got very lucky. I got involved early on in my life with a lot of wonderful people who helped me and guided me. I found out what I really liked to do and that was sing. And I had a lot of help to accomplish most of my goals.
In the early eighties, there were a lot of artists involved with the music scene. All those young artists, before their careers took off, were into music. Robert Longo used to play some guitar. He had a band for a while. Basquiat had a band. I mean, people were always trying to mix music and art - in fact, I'm guilty of it myself.
We need young people to be involved, and we have to expect that young people are going to be impatient, they don't want to wait, and they've got new ideas and new ways of looking at problems.
I think I was just lucky to be brought up in a very musical family. My two older brothers were, and still are, very musical and very creative, and music was a big part of my life from a very young age, so it is quite natural for me to become involved in music in the way that I did.
I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people's albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.
MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.
As people, [my parents were] very colorful, very talkative, passionate, they really loved each other. But that also meant heated, it meant there was a lot of drama in the house. Which is good for a filmmaker, I think.
Hrithik is a great help to me while I compose the music for our films. He gives his inputs to us. He sits with me and learns a lot about music too. He is very fond of learning and very involved in the filmmaking process.
There's a vast ecosystem for music outside of Myspace and Facebook and you need to make sure that your music is in as many hands as possible. I wanted people to share my music and tell friends about me, and if you want to rely on word of mouth, you have to make it easy for people. I got lucky because I had a few songs that hit big and got a lot of links on blog posts.
We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
People used the term "hardcore" loosely. A lot of bands use it as a jumping stone to the next level. Hardcore, it's got a lot more to with then music. It's a very passionate movement.