“I always wanted to be a musician.”

100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory,

As a kid, I wasn’t given the sense that celebrity, or fame or any of that,

Was something to be impressed by, or to seek out. It was always impressed upon me that making something well crafted

I felt like I wanted to make more than just music.

I’m pretty committed to being a filmmaker because it incorporates everything I love: music, art direction, story, and you know – everything.

And I try to preserve whatever’s of value and achievable in their idea.

I’ve never made a video where I didn’t talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment.

Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators.

And I’ve tried to do that where I can in my field.

If it’s something I can’t achieve, I tell them straight.

Otherwise they’re not going to feel great when they’re up there miming it.

My process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist.

I did voice training and piano lessons, and while I was a decent musician.

It didn’t seem like enough for me.

I try to bring musicians into the logistics of filmmaking.

Musicians ultimately are who they are, they aren’t actors, so as a clipmaker you have a responsibility to protect them.

Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we’re one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!

Music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

I’m an ‘evolve or die’ kind of a musician. I think it’s cool to try new things.

For some musicians it becomes self-reflexive to think, “I have to write some of my kind of songs now.”

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.

Not only are they just great, nice guys; they’re some of the best musicians you’re likely to find.