Tinashe doing 'I Wanna Get Better' - it's a really personal song, and it was hard for me to imagine anyone else doing it, but stylistically her and I are so incredibly different that I was fascinated to hear what she'd do with it, and I completely loved it. It just felt like the different expression of a song that, to me, was so stamped in one way.
If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.
Eventually, when I recorded 'Release Me,' it sort of stamped my style, and I've followed in that vein ever since.
I was nurtured by Ralph Farquhar and then, later, by Sara Finney-Johnson and Vida Spears, two black women. So, I actually was nurtured by my culture, in a safe environment that allowed me to build my confidence. And Debbie Allen was one of my mentors, along with Stan Lathan.
Stan Hansen was a tough-as-nails freshman middle linebacker when I was a senior at West Texas State. He was a damn good football player, but he developed some problems with his knees. When football didn't work out he asked me about professional wrestling.
Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.
I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes.
Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don't believe me when I tell them. That's how I saw myself, in comedy.
Being a stand-up comic, this isn't a stepping-stone for me; it's what I do, and this is what I'm always going to do. And even if I do a TV show, the only reasons to do a TV show is to get more people to know me to come out to my stand-up shows.
I don't imagine myself, my work, or my life, fitting into any kind of standardized path. In fact, the idea of there even being a standard freaks me out a lot.
I have to do things for myself, and if those standards are set high, then it's up to me to pass or fail.
Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.
I like finding stuff that I suck at and trying to get better. So I'm taking classes, getting myself comfortable in an acting scene. You've got to work out those ticks. For instance, standing up used to be really hard for me. I act much better if I'm sitting down.
I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can't allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I'm not going to be part of that.
War has been good to me from a financial standpoint but I don't want to make money that way. I don't want blood money.
If it were just a dream to be famous, then I probably would have died a really quick death, because there is nothing about me that equals fame. I'm not a standup comedian. I don't sing.
Anybody who's done standup will tell you that there's nothing like it. The show starts at 8:00, the curtain goes up and there's nobody else except you and the audience, and you just perform for them for two hours. Nobody yells, 'Cut!' There are no retakes. That is still the most exciting medium for me, and I love it.
When I got into Stanford in high school, I had some friends from school who told me that I just got in because I was black and whatnot.
Kiss will always be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley to me.
They let me put the Stanley Cup in my car. I got hookups.
