When I started writing material, I realised you could take a ballad like Usher's 'Nice and Slow,' sing the same melody over a garage track, and everyone would be up and dancing.
I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I'm singing now is what makes the money.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
A lot of singers find a musical genre people like and stick with it. That's being a conformist. I sing ballads, rock, salsa, rap.
Enthusiasms, like stimulants, are often affected by people with small mental ballast.
I want to bring awareness to the lack of diversity in ballet, and feel like that's a large part of my purpose.
Ballet became this escape for me. I feel like I was on my own a lot. I was searching for stability, so I was going off on my own and imagining what I thought stability was. Ballet became a way for me to cope.
I'd rather be a guy that can build a house or fix a car than be able to walk like a ballet dancer.
As a little girl, I didn't dream of being a ballet dancer; I dreamt of being a movie star like Ginger Rogers and dancing with Fred Astaire. I used to watch the Sunday double-bills on TV and Iong to be part of what seemed a perfect Disneyland world. Astaire was a genius.
I trained as a dancer when I was much younger, for a large amount of time, like 6 or 7 years. Not to be a ballet dancer, actually, but I thought it was a complement for an actor. I thought that actors should know how to move, should know how to juggle, should know how to do acrobatics.
I like dramatic ballets, particularly if they're ballets in which I have a chance to go from one extreme of style or characterization to another.
I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.
Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.
I had to take a break to set up my production company. Managing a production house is a different ballgame. It's not like signing a film and arriving on the set.
The jet stream is a very strong force and pushing a balloon into it is like pushing up against a brick wall, but once we got into it, we found that, remarkably, the balloon went whatever speed the wind went.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
'House of Balloons' was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.
I write scripts in storyboard fashion using stick figures, and thought balloons and word balloons and captions. Then I'll write descriptions of what scenes should look like and turn it over to the artist.
I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.
I work a lot with dynamics of how loud I'm talking, like speaking into balloons and then feeling the texture on my fingertips, and then I get used to the feeling on my throat.
