In life, I’m most inspired by entertaining people and driven by the desire to do it by such a powerful force that I think it influences everything I do.
I have vocal trouble from time to time associated with sleep or wine! Or from sleeping in a bunk the size of a coffin and breathing in bus air conditioning all day.
I feel like a lot of the singer-songwriters in my genre and in my generation have gotten more and more snooty about covering other people’s songs. They believe that creativity is the intersect of expression.
But now, with the last two years of touring and being on the road, I’ve learned that a live show should never sound like a record; a record should sound like a live show.
Privilege and complacency paralyze me with fear sometimes. But the less vulnerable we are because of privilege, the country we’re born in, or the security we enjoy, the more vulnerable our souls are to apathy.
I’d love to claim the title of ‘songwriter’ or ‘intellectual,’ but the truth is that anything that I ever learned how to do in conjunction with music was purely so that I would have a platform to sing from.
There are still civil rights issues. There are still people who can’t be visited by their spouse in the hospital because they’re gay. These are humanitarian issues. At the end of the day, all you want is for people to be happy in the pursuit of life, love and liberty.
If I learned to play guitar it was so that I would have something to sing to, if I learned to write a song it was so that I would have something to sing. So the gut feeling you’re talking about comes from singing and communicating the lyrics and what it is that we feel.
