I think the key to directing a great music video is in making sure the song is great, and if it is, then it becomes really fun.
I wrote 'Wish U Were Here' for Cody Simpson, and he invited me to perform with him on tour and be in his music video. He was shy at first. I think it's the surfer boy in him that makes him so mellow.
I think going on tour, having lots of songs and music videos would be super cool.
I don't think music videos are as important as they used to be.
I don't think any artist has really relied on music videos the way I do. It's almost like my radio.
I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.
I think people like musicals. And when done with a modern comedic sensibility, musical comedy can be the most efficient delivery of both storytelling and jokes.
I have no musical talent at all. I was banned from music classes and told I would never be able to understand anything. I still don't think I can sing, but somehow I get away with it.
I come from musical theater, and a lot of musical theater is about accepting fantasy. I think it is more about just being open and accepting.
I have written a lot of musical theatre over my life - two Olivier Award-winning musicals - and I still don't think I'm ready to be the boss in the room.
The band Grizzly Bear, I think they're excellent. There's a beauty and a musicality there that I wish would have been in vogue in the late '80s, when I was forming bands.
Also, I think having a musicality about me that helps in identifying different things in languages and getting them right.
I think, for me, the goal was never really for my EPs to go mainstream. I think the intention of them was to create a little bit of buzz and to show my musicality because I wrote and produced the EPs myself. The goal was to experiment, with no rules.
I think it's important for fans to know that but if I'm doing something that inspires me musically then I think it will inspire someone else too.
I think my children are definitely musically inclined, and they show it, and they're exposed to a lot of it. And they're their own people, and I think easily they could do something musical, or they could do something in acting or film or other types of the arts, and I would fully support it.
'Superunknown' was one of the most dramatic shifts in what we were doing musically. I don't think I realized it at the time.
I don't think today's younger audience... would even know what 1920s musicals were like.
I think performers are all show-offs anyway, especially musicians. Unless you show off, you're not going to get noticed.
I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook.
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
