I was doing a wee gig at the Edinburgh Fringe, and while I was walking down to the show from the train station, someone stopped and asked if they could get a picture with me. This was about six months before I released my first single as well, so my response was, 'Are you sure?'
Every year in Edinburgh, I end up waiting behind the curtain about to go on stage, and I have a moment of thinking, 'No one's told me what to do with this show. I've done exactly what I wanted. This is the biggest arts festival in the world, and all these people have shown up. Aren't I lucky?' It really is amazing.
I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'
Edinburgh is where I started. A lot of the remixes I made were done in my room there, and it was a good place for me to make music.
Computers absolutely changed my life. Before I had a computer, I had never written one thing. Not one thing. I'm a very bad speller and I was embarrassed by that. When I would type, the little mistakes would make me nutty, and I would never edit anything.
I realize that I am typically vulnerable only when and where and how much it suits me. I can choose my writer words and even go back and edit.
I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
For me, my core genius lies in the area of teaching and motivating. I love to do it, I do it well, and people report that they get great value from it. Another core genius is compiling and writing books. Along with my co-author Mark Victor Hansen and others, I have written, co-authored, compiled and edited more than 200 books.
My mother was a very, very funny, outrageous, outspoken person, and she never edited me. Her whole thing in my life was if anybody had a problem with me, tell them to go to hell.
I loved being at the 'Times,' and they were incredibly good to me. I think it's a wonderful paper, and I was really well edited.
I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.
People are following me because they want to see pictures of me. So why is Instagram editing them?
I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.
Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing.
I directed a short series for Hulu called 'Paloma,' and being in an editing room, I learned a lot about acting. It gave me a new bolt of energy in terms of my interest in filmmaking because it made me realize how collaborative filmmaking can be and also that you're not just limited to one job.
When I did 'Gilbert Grape,' Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.
If I can have the opportunity to go into an editing room, it's like the golden ticket for me. All I want is to learn about everything else in the filmmaking process. I just directed a music video which just came out and that'd sort of be the area of the field that I'm going to move into, I hope.
As a kid, looking at Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, New Edition, the Temptations, Motown, people who I felt were huge artists, they made me wanna do something.
I'm not getting recognized because I posed in a swimsuit edition of some magazine, but because of what I do on the field, and that's important to me.
I would pretty much like to forget the music that happened to me between the ages of eight and 11, so I'm going to say the first album I bought was the special edition of 'Dark Side of the Moon.'
