There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.
TV is a completely different discipline, which I think I am still learning about. You just have to learn how to work fast and pace yourself.
Music changes. Nothing stays the same. You just gotta be able to roll with the punches. When the music changes, it's not that you gotta change too - it's that you gotta be able to maintain and hold your ground.
The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song.
Music has changed a lot over the past few years so I believe it's necessary to adjust in order to make music the fans want to hear. If I need to release single after single instead of releasing the album, that is what I will do to reacquaint fans with who I am as an artist now.
'Fast and Furious' is the only franchise that I've directed that I did not create from scratch. So it definitely was an eye-opening experience for me coming to that world. I had to be respectful of the roles that had been established by the filmmakers before me, and I was cool with that.
Each director is different. Clint Eastwood and Chris Nolan are completely different, and I need to adjust to the story and character and the director and just my duty as an actor.
I was kind of scared at first to do that [vice-over] because when you're on set, a lot of the things going on around you - the environment and playing off other actors - and that's what makes it easier and helps you to be in your character. So, realizing you're not going to have that and you're going to be secluded in this booth, it's like, "How am I going to be a character when I'm just in these walls?"
When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.
We have always adapted ourselves to the songs instead of vice versa.
Music changes, and I'm gonna change right along with it.
I've tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I'll try to tailor-make it.
The speed of the TV stuff vs. the self-imposed pace of novel writing has been a big adjustment, and going back and forth often feels like whiplash.
I've learned a lot from being a chameleon, sort of adopting the musical personalities of who I was playing with.
You just have to re-wire your brain when you're shifting from the stage to the screen or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.
What we need to do, as writers, is find out where our market is and adapt to it. I'm not saying that you follow every trend slavishly, but what you see is that, if there is a sea-change in the way that things are being done, then you account for it.
You have to be a little commercial, and that's what I learnt over the years.
Once you are shooting a movie, even if it's your own script, you have to let it go at a certain point. That's true for every film. It breaks up into phases where the thing that you have in front of you is the thing you have to address, and you can't worry about what you imagined a scene was going to like and that it came out differently, because that's what you have to make work.
The biggest challenge was the whole learning curve of being solo artist. I've been in bands for so long that being a solo artist was completely new thing.
I wanted to play the piano, but my fingers weren't long enough, so I took up the guitar.
Art was carrying me a lot of the time. When you're accustomed to playing with Art, and you play with other drummers, it's as if the bottom dropped out.
I found out about it probably 9 - 10 months before we shot the film [Don't Kill It] because it was postponed a couple of times, which was actually a good thing because once it all finally came together, I had to get in there and roll off different pages of dialogue and monologues pretty quickly.
I think someone like Jack Kirby, for instance, would suffer greatly in the transition from print to digital were he still around.
Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.
To translate, one must have a style of his own, for the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.
