As my career has progressed, I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest jazz cats on the planet. But that doesn't change my desire to entertain folks. That's really who I am.
I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.
It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.
I loved playing the guitar and I knew I was pretty good at it, so that's what I wanted to do with my life.
Playing guitar was a calling, but I never realized that it was going to be a career. It was just something I did out of love.
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Well, since I'm six years old, I've been playing the violin, the piano, I've been singing. It's always been a dream of mine, but I really never had the courage to actually go and do it professionally.
My son is a professional musician now.
I tried to play anything people would hire me to play, because I was a musician.
When I play in Atlantic City, I perform Tuesdays through Sundays for two weeks, and I have 91-percent attendance. No one else plays six days a week, two shows per night, and does that kind of business.
Music is the career I'm lucky enough to get paid for, but I have other desires and passions.
When I was 19, I made my first good week's pay as a club musician. It was enough money for me to quit my job at the factory and still pay the rent and buy some food. I freaked.
When I went to college, I thought I was going to become a professional musician. I was a French horn player, so I went to Yale to study with a very unusual French horn player.
We make music for a living. Like I've always said, if you like what you're doing, you're halfway there; if someone else likes it, that's even better. If they don't like it, at least you like it. Not to be selfish, but you kind of have to be.
I knew I had a gift. I wanted the world to hear my music, and I wanted it to be my career, but I didn't know how to go about it.
I think if you retire from touring then people think you are retired.
For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.
I played guitar when I was young and never really considered it as a way to make a living.
In my early life, I was a professional folk singer. I used to sing on the national television and radio in Canada. Nobody knows that - but now I've said it, haven't I? I'm strictly a shower singer at the minute.
The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players.
Originally my entire goal with music was for it to be my job. When I sit down to make a beat, I wanna know that I'm gonna get paid from it, and that I can pay my bills and still have money left over to be a person.
I'm a working musician, so it's what I do. I kind of always have lots of plates spinning, and it's the ones that keep spinning the longest that I end up doing.
My record company certainly wants me to play live, badly, but I have no such plans. My only motivation to do such a thing would be money, and I don't think that's a good reason to play live.
I had a very strange career. I mean I went from playing to 150,000 people in 1983/84. Three or four years later I was playing to four people, you know, in Melbourne. I thought - bit strange, you know bit odd, bit erratic.
I've always had lots of side projects in my life, but what's exciting for me is knowing that Adrenaline Mob is bigger than that.
