First, I started taking dance classes, and then I started taking singing lessons. Then my mom put me into a year-round theatre program where I did seven shows.
There's a scene in 'Singin' in the Rain' where this guy dances with a giant doll while singing 'Make 'Em Laugh.' I remember loving the pure physicality of it.
All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it - no matter where it is.
I was Danny Zuko in 'Grease,' and I was in the musical 'Sweet Charity' and then in the musical 'On the Twentieth Century.' They were great. I mean, singing isn't really my strong suit, but I just really enjoyed it.
I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.
I was always daydreaming about singing in big productions on Broadway.
My father's a deacon, my mother's a choir director, so I grew up in the church and singing in the choir, begging my mom if I could have a solo.
I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
I guess, from the beginning, Thurston and Kim were the dominant singers in the band, and although I was singing in bands previously, I guess I mainly deferred to them a lot in terms of who was singing the bulk of the songs.
I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.
'Titanium' wasn't supposed to be me singing, but they put my demo vocal back on.
I grew up doing musical theatre in Orlando, Florida. When I was 14, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - a deliveryman heard me singing and offered to deliver my demo tape to Sony Music. I was just really lucky.
But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.
I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?
I've learned how to be a better performer on stage and interact with the fans, make it feel like a collective experience more than just me singing songs on a stage and feeling really detached.
I have deliberately kept singing because I have to at my age. If I stopped for even a year my voice would slowly deteriorate until it's not there at all. That's a fact about getting to my age.
If my career detour from special education to singing has done one thing, it has afforded me the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others.
When we were shooting 'Oz,' my wife was doing 'Beauty and the Beast' on Broadway, singing and dancing. It was an interesting dichotomy in our house.
A couple of weeks ago, I did karaoke and got nervous in a way I hadn't gotten nervous in 25 years. I'm so used to getting on stage in front of strangers to tell jokes, but singing is a whole different animal.
There's nothing wrong with the screaming style of singing, and I'll be the first to admit that it conveys an emotion. But I'm getting older, and I can't scream and shout about the same things anymore. The songs I'm writing with Stone Sour call for a lighter, different approach.
