One of the people I most admired was Christopher Hitchens. He was extremely polarizing but extremely honest, to a fault sometimes, but I respected him for that, and I loved his debating style.
My role models have kept on changing.
The biographies are very enlightening because you realise, "Oh my God, all these people I’ve admired - and tried to emulate even - when I was younger died tragically from substance abuse.
Getting to meet people that I've admired my entire life, and getting to meet them in such a way where they're coming in to play completely different characters than I had ever seen them do is just wonderful.
I haven't got one or two people that I aspired to be like.
All of the people we admire have extensive catalogs, so what's most exciting about people responding well to the band is allowing us to continue making as many records as we can.
I can look back on my life, where there have been moments where things might have gone the other way. Everything is like stepping stones, and I've seen people I admire falter. We're all vulnerable.
I think that one of the things I'd learned from being so attentive to the careers of the people I've admired is the fact that they would say 'no' a lot. Early on, I took that as a cue to only work on things that I knew I would be passionate about.
In my case, dust has become gold: Today, I work with people I grew up admiring.
The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.
