I listen to Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, U2, and it becomes part of me, comes out in my music. Wherever it goes, there will always be the fabric of New Orleans in it.
Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.
My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take the elevated train and then the subway to get there.
I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.
Patty Griffin is iconic, and there's no other word to really describe her. She is iconic for a lot of people - not only for me but for a lot of fans. Her voice is one of a kind, and she's such an important figure in the American music scene.
On my block, we grew up like family. Summer times, man, psshh, we in the back in the alley or in the front on the block. Somebody has some music playing, and nine times out of ten, it's soul music. We got whatever we drinking that day, we got some food, we probably even grilling. It's just a good time.
I just didn't make music that you could sing with a big grin, still don't.
I had to realize that you can't try to get money, support yourself, and grind doing whatchu need to do at the same time. The music is the grind. You really gotta grind. You gotta find your way around. You can't be stuck tryna get there.
Growing up, I was trying to make it in music. I was grinding, which is just what I loved doing. I didn't have nothing else to do. In my spare time, I'd record myself. Find a beat, pulling em up. Just making something and creating for me.
Downloadable music is the biggest musical phenomenon since the Beatles, and the music industry is slow to come to grips with that.
I make music that I know that people will enjoy, and balance the ideas and philosophy that we put in music with music that when we play it live, people can move to it and groove to it.
And whenever I do step away from the Internet or the music too long, it's like I have to slowly get back into myself to get back into the groove.
I don't believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you're doing with it.
The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds.
I don't think of anyone as a 'groupie.' People who connect with my music are just inspiring and amazing.
I'm just lucky because my kids are grown-up - I love them, very proud of them, and we are in close contact as big-time friends, but they don't need me that much now and I can actually enjoy this wonderful world of music.
I've made music for grownups most of my life as a singer/songwriter - often with my band, Nine Stories - recorded many albums, and 10 years ago I started recording kid's music, too.
I had been playing since I was 2 years old, never remembering a life without music, always playing everything naturally and mostly by ear, and all the grownups wanted were more scales and drudgery out of me.
I just had lunch with Slash two days ago. He loves Axl. He holds no grudges towards him. Twenty years of great music wasn't created because of some stupid grudge. That's a shame.
I had phases of listening to rap and trap, and then I had phases where I'd listen to post-hardcore, rap, grunge, metal... all that. I had different time periods of listening to different music. And now it all clashes together.
