I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. And it was way to literal for me.
For me, in songwriting, I have a route I can take. Maybe there's some forks, I can go this way, this way. But I know those roads. I still have the experience behind me.
My mother was a waitress in a Lyons Corner House, but she married up. She was keen on bettering herself. She taught me how to use the right knives and forks and behave properly.
They urged me to take up winter quarters at the forks of the Platt, stating that if I attempted to advance further until spring, I would endanger the lives of my whole party.
I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education. In order to appreciate cultures of another nation, one needs to go there, know the people and mingle with the culture of that country. One way to do that, if one is lucky enough, is to buy things from those cultures.
Marriage is like a formality for me.
Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.
I have my website, The Ruckus, which is an Internet site, similar to the Funny or Die format, where people post funny videos. I get a chance to rate their videos; they get a chance to blog and kick it with me.
They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles.
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
I wouldn't be where I am, if not for Jamaica. My formative years were here. I wouldn't have the confidence that I have if I wasn't born here, because growing up here I knew I could become anybody I wanted to become. There was no ceiling on top of me.
Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.
The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.
If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?
The McLaren prizes can only help me in my quest to ultimately reach Formula One.
It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work onstage.
