When I started Dylan's Candy Bar in 2001, I wanted it to be a place that merged my love of pop culture, fashion, art and music with candy. Since then, we have been fortunate to pioneer artistic partnerships with many legends.
The first record I made when I was 17. Labels merged and plans didn't work out, but plans never work out as planned. But I never stopped making music. I never had a backup plan. I never thought, 'Maybe I should just write, or maybe I should...' I just kept going.
The opportunity and the concept of merging music culture with actual boxing is exciting. It's bringing a younger demographic to the sport.
My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie.
I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.
My mom's an art teacher, so I always had music in the house. She always had records, and I was mesmerized by the mechanics of how a turntable works.
Christmas brings us great music: Everything from Handel's 'Messiah' to 'White Christmas,' to 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.'
But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.
I thought I was going to be an actor. I liked entertaining. I was pretty much tap dancing for attention from a very early age. My family was kind of musical, and there were people in the circus next door and actors across the road. I just enjoyed messing around with music growing up, but I really thought I was going to be an actor.
I like a lot of metal music. So that's really what I listen to a lot. Or I listen to a lot of kind of off the cuff, like I love artists like Santigold, or Gold Frapp. Yeah. Pelican. Yeah.
I actually get a metallic taste in my mouth when I think about electric music.
The 'Black Album' was my real first introduction to Metallica. I was, like, 12 or 13 at the time. We were just getting into music, and I liked that album a lot, but it didn't necessarily change my life. But when I started picking up all the other Metallica records, 'Master of Puppets' was the one to me that stuck out with its songwriting.
I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.
I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.
I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.
We played at a festival in Mexico City, at the same time as another famous artist, and I reckon we had 55,000 people watching New Order; the other had 7,000. I think from that I've discovered the secret of success in the music industry: don't do any promotion.
When I first started recording music, we would record in the closet with socks on the mic.
Mick Jagger has produced some great films and brought us stories about the music industry that have changed the way we think about how music is made. I never thought I would actually call him my boss, let alone meet Mick Jagger or have any reason to say my name in the same sentence as his.
Chicago, I feel, is a microcosm for the segregated, violent environment that is America. I try to not only speak about these things in music, but also try to address these things in real life tangibly with action.
I guess now music is so saturated and so microwaved. It's, like, 15 minutes in the microwave and boom, you've got something. Nobody's putting passion or any thought behind it anymore.
