Performance Routine Quotes

If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

There's variables at every single gig. I look forward to those every night. We have a lot of things that happen in our show, a lot of people from the outside watching the show might think it's one schtick after the next. We promised ourselves we have to be there mentally. We have to be aware. We are forced to be aware.

Getting ready: the show girl scratches her breast and shakes out her feathers.

You can't get tied into your past. It's not fun for me. You can't just keep doing the same material forever. Some people just play the hits, and it's the same show every night. They're happy to do that. I personally am not.

"On Script" is one of my favorite songs I've ever written. I'd just been jamming on it one day, and again I was struggling with lyrics. I'm still figuring out what it's about. I've seen a couple of reviews that are like, "It's about the monotony of playing the same songs every night," because I say, "On script every night/Like a well-rehearsed stage show." It's not about that at all, but I find that funny, how people project what they think about me, or songwriters in general.

But that constant adjustment and adaptation to your new environment, all the variables are the same. There's always a promoter, there's always a rider, there's always a shower, and there's always a stage.

I did 15 shows a week when I lived in New York. I did five shows on a Friday and seven shows on a Saturday. It was everything I did and it was my sole source of income.

You do have habits and rhythms that you do sort of fall into when you're acting, but if you've got text that doesn't allow you to do that it puts you in a bit of an uncomfortable space and takes you out of your habits.

I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it.

Sure, I miss some things about the stage. The thing I like is the immediacy. But then I complain, 'I gotta do the same part for six months.'

People expect me to do the classics, and it is a lot like playing a favorite song.

We would change out of costume, then we would read the next days script.

It's always ideal if the production that you're taking out on tour is the one that you spent two weeks rehearsing with, and you just do the same show thirty nights in a row.

A lot of the world turns into checklists for me when I'm on the road. Like, OK, this person's alive, this person's fed, this person's good. Soundcheck is done. Everything becomes a checklist except for the actual show.

Before every performance, you need at least half an hour to focus on what you are about to do: the walk-on and walk-off, the lyrics, how you are going to sing it - like, the original or bring your own personal flavour to it - how are you going to make it the best.

That's how I digest it, 'cause I can press the fast-forward button and I know that I'm gonna have to continue to be an actor, continue to make choices, continue to perform in a show every week.

It's important for me not to peak before I hit the stage. In other words, I save all of my creative and physical energy for when I walk on stage. If I can get 45 minutes of just easy going, playing rhythm, songs, stuff like that, then that's what I do to make sure that I'm all stretched out and ready.

I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There's nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.

To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out.

When you do a show five days a week and one night a week, the way I was doing, you use up so much music every day that pretty soon you find yourself hustling for material.

I don't like to do material people have heard. Now, they like to hear material that they know, because that's the stuff that made me famous, and, unfortunately, I don't do a ton of it.

I've done two shows every day for years, but I don't think I could work on just one show a week. I would go crazy, and I would drive everybody nuts. I've got to feel like I'm under pressure.

I am always in much better shape when I am doing a Broadway show because you have the eight shows a week to kind of keep the body clean and perfect in a sense, you know? For instance, I always eat much better when I am in a show because you can't have dairy - for your voice.

If I want to do song and dance, I will and I would like to but I don't want to do it in every film. Where is the novelty then? It just takes the fun out of work for me.

Once you have the pattern of life of this person, the choreography, so to speak, you have the canvas that you present eight times a week, not without feeling underneath it, but it's not as churning as the discovery process was.