I just want to say that I’m, like, living for myself, because I was onstage at Radio City Music Hall with Christina Aguilera – and my name was on the screen. It was a big moment!
I always take a hot shower before I go onstage. It’s so refreshing. I let the steam into my throat. That’s the way I warm up my vocal cords – in the shower. I start by humming and then finally singing.
The best thing about theatre is that every time we get onstage, the show is new.
There are times when I’ve had ideas walking down the street that I thought were great, and the minute I got onstage, I would think of them and go, ‘Wow, that would never work,’ even before I did it in front of the audience.
One Christmas, I wrote a nativity play. But nobody turned up on the day of the performance apart from my brother and my cousins, so I just read the whole script onstage and made my brother pretend to be one of the animals at the inn.
Lena Horne – when she walked onstage, she really was Erzulie.
There were not a lot of women in the theater department – it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can’t really be backstage.
To play vinyl onstage is not my thing. For me, vinyl is for home listening.
Figure out a way to get back onstage because once you do it a few times you’ll get over it. Unless it’s like a clinical thing. I don’t know about clinical like stage fright, that might be worse than what I’m talking about. But if it’s normal stage fright get over it.
Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.
I just enjoy being onstage and relating to the audience.
I’m too scared to perform onstage. I’m not very good with big crowds.
I think comedy can be a way of sugar-coating a pill that needs to be taken, and whatever I complain about onstage, I hope I justify the negativity by using humour to make the point.
I wasn’t trying to be a role model with ‘The Dutchess,’ but suddenly, seeing little girls in the audience with their moms made me think about what I do onstage a little bit more. I had to watch my mouth, because it can be filthy. It changed things for me.
Although I’m a lead guitarist, I’d say that a good 95 percent of my time onstage is spent playing rhythm.
I always thought you went out and entertained people and got nothing back in return. But in the last year, I’ve realised that what the crowd gives you is so amazing, that sometimes I just stand onstage and cry.
Joe Rogan has this podcast where he’s talking astrophysics and lean BMI indexes and weird philosophy most of the time and yet, when you see him onstage, you’re like, ‘Oh, this guy is just a killer comedian.’
I’ve had jokes stolen a thousand times. But if you can do it better than me, you can have it. I’ve had jokes stolen from me in the club when I’m next on stage. And my brain will start to turn, and the gears will start turning, and I’ll go onstage and create a whole new bit.
For years, I was stuck behind a keyboard rig. When I started playing guitar onstage, it was a bit of a release – not to be stuck in one spot the whole night. It’s really enjoyable having the freedom to move around. You just have to remember to end up somewhere near a microphone.
Onstage or in films, you do affect peoples’ lives, and sometimes that’s very gratifying. But still, there’s this little voice that says you should be doing something that matters.
I missed being onstage behind the microphone. After a while, it was hard to hear another voice singing my lyrics.
I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that’s how I get it out – with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it’s always kind of a wail.
I think I spent a lot of my mid-twenties thinking it was a problem of my onstage persona. But, actually, it was my actual personality. I was still working out what kind of person I was.
I’m actually not an exhibitionist at all. When you get onstage and you get under the lights playing music, I feel more hidden and more alone than anywhere else. You hide behind your music and let your emotions come out through the music.
To be able to be at the level that I perform onstage, I have to embody everything I’ve made my music about. Which is me.
I’m not someone who comes onstage and says, ‘I’m rewriting this now.’ I don’t think it’s fair to the writers or the director, or the other actors.
The silent thing onstage allows for a kind of intimacy that no conversation can have. If I just shut up, we’re forced to look at each other and really confront that moment.
We have a lot of people onstage. We have a live violin, live cello, live drums played on this kind of massive electronic kit with some acoustic elements built in.
All the satisfaction I need… comes when I step out onstage and see the people. That’s awesome. I love that.
All the things I do in my videos – the jumps, twirls and back bends – will also be onstage.
I have a lot of experience in the studio, performing onstage, talking to an audience. I learned most of that stuff when I was performing with my mom.
I don’t know who in my family thinks very fast at all, including me. The things that people see me do onstage are written, so it doesn’t have to be very quick if you have all day with a pen.
It’s sort of a feeling of power onstage. It’s really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don’t really think it’s power… it’s the goodness.
If you can’t imagine female torch singers and Skrillex-style demon techno onstage at the same moment, you don’t know Eurovision.
Being onstage and communicating with an audience was part of my life since I was very little, but I was never pushed into singing. My parents were so uninterested in me making music.
Onstage, I am a devil. But I’m hardly a social reject.
I’ve really improved, I think, as far as just being able to get up onstage with my guitar and sing.
My dad loves to be talked about, good or bad. He just loves it. He’s not even hearing the content, he’s just hearing him. When I’m onstage, he’s looking at the audience members and can’t believe that there are strangers listening to me, and he’s just delighted by the whole thing.
There are a bunch of talented bands out there… So yeah, I often think, ‘Why aren’t these people onstage and why do I have a microphone?’
Performing is my therapy, to become different people onstage.
There are only so many hours you can sit on the bus and watch TV or play basketball or whatever we do to pass the time before we go out onstage.
I might come across like kind of a show-off onstage and stuff, but I like collaborating with people.
I would say just in general, in life, I’m more willing to be animated as a person, and so obviously onstage as well.
I think there is no better training than being onstage because here’s the thing: the theater requires you to act with your whole body. I think acting with your whole body gives you a root, and you can build from there.
I always felt like there wasn’t a blueprint for father-daughter relationships – for them or for us. Because what are they supposed to do with us, treat us like boys, or small women, or what? Father-daughter relationships are so unique from family to family, and I’d love to watch it explored more onstage.
The more you work in this business as a comedian, the closer you get to just being yourself onstage, on camera, the more well received you are.
My mother was electric onstage, and I vividly recall the extraordinary power she had over her audiences.
If I acted like I did onstage in normal life, everyone would probably hate me.
I was at the radio station all the time and on the air all the time. I met John Travolta and a lot of the other big ’70s icons. Shaun Cassidy sang ‘Da Do Ron Ron’ to me onstage. I thought I was a rock star; I had an all-access-pass childhood.
I continue to write songs that are topically related to social, political and economic issues of our time, but I also recognize that onstage, I have a lot of fun and audiences have a lot of fun, so I’m trying to package the messages in music and sounds that are fun to perform and fun to listen to.
It’s good to be playing one and a half hour again. In the States we played like an hour and when you got onstage it felt like all of a sudden you are already done your set. But now, it feels like we are touring again.
I celebrate masculinity when I’m onstage.
I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus – having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don’t see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it’s more exploring a different side of your personality.
I think film and television actually is a lot harder. Acting onstage is physically more arduous, but to get to emotional truth within a scene, it’s much tougher to do it on film.
I’ll give you my worst nightmare. I’m dreaming that I’m onstage, the curtain goes up, and I have no idea what my lines are or what’s going on. I think I should know, I kind of know, I remember rehearsing… and the audience is there waiting.
Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.
