I'd say the key thing is to remain true to what originally got you into music. When I wrote 'Hallelujah,' it ignited me to do music because of the love and joy that I got from writing that song. Down the road, you get all of these opinions from people; just remember what got you started in the first place.
Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I'll just say this really quickly - they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves.
Our story is in two halves, as the band's career up to Freddie's death was 20 years, and 20 years later, our music is as popular as it was then. It's a sort of everlasting... income.
If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than forced music. I mean, this world has enough of that right now, where it's basically McDonald's making music. 'Everybody needs another hamburger and fries.' Here's a piece of crap that nobody's gonna care about it two years.
The music you love when you're a teenager is always going to be the most important to you, and I find that it's all over the score of 'Hamilton.'
I feel like my objective in music is to take a hammer and nail and chip away a piece of my heart and give it to someone, so I feel, with merch, it's a tangible parallel of that.
If the artists would just keep hammering away - unify, stick together - then music will become the king again, which is what it should be.
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
It's kind of hard to get deep with Rodgers and Hammerstein. I can't think of a moral in the music - it's just fun.
My older sister Nikki went to Hampton music school in Virginia, then to another school later in New York.
I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I'm such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.
I've always been into dressing and being stylish because I feel like that's where I gained a lot of my confidence and swag as a rapper, so fashion goes hand-in-hand with music to me.
Music and the WWE go hand-in-hand.
Anytime fashion and music go hand-in-hand and it really is an organic fit, it's amazing.
I'm very obsessed with pop culture of the mid-century and it goes hand-in-hand with the music that I studied in school.
I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.
One thing I've always loved doing is hanging out and talking music with other artists.
We came out in the midst of the hippie hangover. All this mellow music.
Hank Williams' music - it just doesn't go away, for some reason.
Oh, I think country has changed tremendously. I think country has totally changed. Country music when I was a kid was Hank Williams. If you put Hank and Elvis together, there wasn't that musical difference. But as the Beatles showed up and the English invasion, I think country music got pretty far away from rock n' roll.
