People love events - they love performances, they love music - and I think Australians are great entertainers.
My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It's when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.
I try to make music with emotion and integrity. And authenticity. You can feel when something's authentic, and you can feel when it's not: you know when someone's trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It's none of that. It's just my emotions.
I think when people listen to music, they can truly feel authenticity. For me personally, as a listener, there's certain songs where I'm just like, 'Man, I know that person was really feeling that.'
It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical. But it's what everyone wants - to get everyone's attention, to have your music make a living for you, to be validated in that way.
Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.
'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.
I sure saw a lot of kids that I'm sure didn't know a lot about us, or we were definitely new to them. The kids who came up to me afterward, we'd talk about music, sign a lot of autographs. So I'm sure we made a lot of new fans.
Getting people to like my music was challenging at first. It's hard to get people to like your music. There isn't a simple formula that automatically makes people like you.
I guarantee you, yoga will compete with computers, music, sports, automobiles, the drug industry. Yoga will take over the world!
There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.
In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill.
In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.
The sound world that I created for 'Avatar' had to be very different, really, than anything I ever created before. There is also three hours of music.
It's all about music, because music is basically what's... been my avenue out of maybe being involved in things I shouldn't be.
We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.
I'm always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.
Most of our music is about how we perceive the world and how we try to persist as normal, average human beings. So our fans inspire us and give us a direction to go as musicians. And of course, their love and support keeps us going.
