I wanted to play drums, and I got a set when I was 14 and just started to play in the house, to the stereo. I liked Ringo Starr, of course. And Sandy Nelson. I had his record, ‘Let There Be Drums,’ and I’d play along with it.
I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn’t lived long enough to experience. That’s why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.
There are times when I get really depressed, when I’m going through difficult times and when I want someone to hold my hand. Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Forget it. I want to be this way.’ I often feel that way. But when we started the Love Yourself World Tour, I stopped having those thoughts.
I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.
I used to be incredibly afraid of public speaking. I started with five people, then I’d speak to 10 people. I made it up to 75 people, up to 100, and now I can speak to a very large group, and it feels similar to speaking to you one-on-one.
I started studying piano at the age of four.
I started playing basketball so late, it just means that anything is possible.
My mom passed away a day before high school started, and her dream was for me to be a full rock and roll guy, and play drums in a band.
After the situation with Kursk submarine, I started looking at Mr. Berezovsky in a completely different way. For me, it was a turning point in our relationship. I think that he took a completely dishonorable position.
The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just ‘Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?’ But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions.
I started recording in ’67. In the first part of ’68, my first single was ‘Backup Train.’ That was success to a degree. Four years have passed by since then, and I have managed to come up with a few measly sellers.
In the early ’90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.
Vision gets the dreams started. Dreaming employs your God-given imagination to reinforce the vision. Both are part of something I believe is absolutely necessary to building the life of a champion, a winner, a person of high character who is consistently at the top of whatever game he or she is in.
As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be good.
I’m trying to conquer swimming. I’m getting there. I’ve gotta conquer it. I had a fear of drowning and tunnels and flying. I started flying and got my pilot’s license, so I conquered that. Now, I’m onto swimming and tunnels.
I started doing motivational tours. I’ve seen all kinds of people, from the CEOs to the lowest executive, opening up to their fears. We don’t introspect as much as we should.
If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.
There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women’s stories. God, the BBC’s practically run by women.
When the music industry started collapsing, the logical people understood that the only place to go for shelter was the underground. If the world on the surface is burning up, and you know people that have bunkers, go to the bunkers.
Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.
I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.
Telling people that I wanted to make dance music, or be on the radio, they looked at me like I was crazy because there was nothing like that in Lichtenstein when I was getting started. That’s why I went to Germany, because there is industry there.
When I got sober and started working out, I fell into that trap of working out too much. I know a lot of guys can relate to that – if you don’t get that runner’s high every day, you feel like, ‘Oh my God, I’m losing it.’
I didn’t vote, exactly. This is the first time I’ve been politically inclined and active, and I think Donald Trump is a tremendous president. And I wanted to be educated. I wanted to do a deep dive before I started going out there and saying stuff as opposed to other people who mindlessly vote.
I started calling myself the Pied Piper, when I started using the flute sound in my music.
The best pop music is the songs that a group of people can dance to, but you can also listen to in your bed and cry. That’s something obviously that The Beatles started and… so having that darkness there opens another door.
When I started out, I didn’t have any desire to be an actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.
Stylistically, I love make-up. I love doing my own make-up and stuff, but clothes-wise, I actually didn’t ever really care. Initially the fashion world was more interested in me than the music world, which was strange when I first started singing.
I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.
I just wanted to make melodies. I started trying to do my own thing and let the melodies make the genre themselves.
My career began somewhat accidentally. In the 1960s, I started a practice in the fledgling field of mind-body healing. Around that time, it was completely in its infancy. I had been developing a protocol to use body awareness as a tool for stress reduction.
A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television.
Seven years ago, when I started free soloing long, hard routes in Yosemite – climbing without a rope, gear or a partner – I did it because it seemed like the purest, most elegant way to scale big walls. Climbing, especially soloing, felt like a grand adventure, but I never dreamed it could be a profession.
The reason for my big success in England was the Brits – they started wanting to go on holidays, like Spain and Greece.
I was gutted to leave my boyfriend at home when I started my tour, but taking my pillow was like taking a little bit of him with me.
Some of my writing is very subconscious, and that’s definitely what happened with ‘Body Language’ – I looped some basic bossa nova sounds and just started singing.
I started out as a guitarist in the early ’80s.
I started off as a kid who didn’t care what my education was.
I didn’t know when Parliament started to pay my wages.
Getting organized in the normal routines of life and finishing little projects you’ve started is an important first step toward realizing larger goals. If you can’t get a handle on the small things, how will you ever get it together to focus on the big things?
Just set yourself a goal and try and stick to it. Because you’ll always end up better than where you started.
When I first started out in this music industry, I was most concerned with freedom. Freedom to produce, freedom to play all the instruments on my records, freedom to say anything I wanted to.
I was a kid living in New Jersey, who – I’d wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn’t even really into jazz that much.
I am just like my mother. She raised me to love and take care of animals, especially the ones that need it the most and so I started Eddie’s Rescue Ranch. We take in animals that need extra care and attention and the animals that get left behind.
We all started snowboarding in the beginning as a family just to be closer together, go on trips. It was our soccer, but instead of Dad yelling at me from the sideline he is there riding with me and hitting the jumps even before I am hitting them.
I only started playing piano because I had chickenpox when I was about 14 and wasn’t allowed to play my drums for a whole week… We had a piano in the house, so I just sat down and played that instead.
