I just love a slow groove. I feel so comfortable in it. But I listen to a lot of fast music, a lot of techno and house.
I'm recording an album. It's sort of techno mixed with garbage - you, know, intense in-your-face music.
Teens think listening to music helps them concentrate. It doesn't. It relieves them of the boredom that concentration on homework induces.
It's so cool though when I see thirty-year-old men that are coming in to watch my shows. It's like, 'You really like my music? Like a teenage girl, you relate to it?' It just proves how much people are alike.
I've always had a teenage thread running through my music. On my first album, I had a song called 'Confessions of a Teenage Girl.' It's about using your feminine wealth to get what you want.
When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I'd discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.
I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren't publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.
I wasn't prepared for the environment I encountered trying to break into television news. In the world of music, where I spent my formative years, we were judged solely on our talent, and gender wasn't a factor.
I have tried to show the influence of folk music in Bollywood, in Tamil movies, in Telugu cinema.
Music inflames temperament.
I certainly have gotten caught up in the music business at various times in my life, mostly because you want to get along with whatever record company you're dealing with. I don't want to be flaky. I don't want to be some temperamental, hard-to-work-with musician.
When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues.
My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.
Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.
Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
Whenever you play dance music, it serves a function. It becomes a utility; you have to worry about the tempos and what you're going to play for people. But when you're playing for listening, you're free.
If I'm left to my own devices, I will be tempted to make the most unlistenable music possible.
When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of music.
When I sing, I want people to think only about the tenor and only about the music.
There is a basic language of music that I think is important for communicating with other musicians - just the kind of terminology that might make it easier to describe your ideas to the other guys in your band.
