Thinking back on it, I've been in this business since I was 3, and I grew up in musical theater, so I was raised and surrounded by gay men and gay women. I was hardly around anyone straight.
A. J. McLean
I grew up in musical theatre and love to perform on stage.
My mother insisted that I pursue music. I rented out my father's musical equipment and earned some money. As a child, I wasn't sure about a career goal, but I was always fascinated by electronic gadgets, specially musical equipment.
A. R. Rahman
I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.
A. S. Byatt
My dad's paternal grandparents were musically inclined. And I remember as a little kid going to visit them in their senior building, and they were, like, the stars of the building, especially hosting and performing in their senior talent show.
Aaron Lazar
I sort of wrongfully judged 'Mamma Mia!' for so long. I thought of it as a jukebox musical that I wasn't interested in. I was so wrong.
The extras are a nice bonus feature, but the main incentive is the musical experience.
Aaron Neville
I hate musicals. There, I said it.
Aaron Paul
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
Aaron Sorkin
I definitely started to perform a little bit in middle school, but not the typical musical/play route. I think that I am funny, but it was more of a social thing, where that was my part in my circle of friends.
Abbi Jacobson
I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.
Abigail Washburn
Whenever I start to really think about what I'm playing, I may play it better musically, but the feeling isn't there.
Ace Frehley
My 9-year-old daughter can recite every line from 'Easy Rider,' and that is not an easy song to do. She raps all of Nicki Minaj and everything; she's dope. She has my musical ear for sure. She sings, and she's beautiful. It's very powerful.
Action Bronson
I come from a musical family as well as a culinary family.
I'm obsessed with musicals.
Adam F. Goldberg
I try not to get trapped in any one musical or visual style at all.
Adam Lambert
I love plays that have musical moments. I'm not a big fan of musicals per se, but I love straight plays that have musical edges to them. I don't know if I will ever be able to structure a musical, but 'Finer Noble Gases' is as close as I've gotten.
Adam Rapp
Musicians don't respect a lot of the stuff that is on TRL and a lot of musicians think that stuff on the radio is not good musically so when musicians say that they like us it obviously feels good.
Adam Rich
I prefer musicals, because I am the best dancer who ever lived. The best plies, the best sashays, and by far the best-smelling Capezios.
Adam Sandler
I think with musicals, it's much more part of the script. They don't want songs that would stop the show; they need songs that keep the plot moving.
Adam Schlesinger
My brother really shaped my musical taste when I was younger. He turned me on to classic rock like Led Zeppelin, and then he got me into R.E.M. and U2.
I feel like a lot of my past career was going to film school, making a lot of different kinds of movies. I made a bunch of comedies, I made one drama and I made a couple musicals.
I come from a non-musical family.
I can't do too much musical movement with a lot of MC's, because they don't know how to follow me. But with Souls of Mischief, I could go anywhere because they are musicians - they rap as musicians, and they play instruments and produce, so they get that.
People like RZA and DJ Premier are really on the balcony to scope my musical theories. They also help me focus on making sure I make money, making sure I get the notoriety I should, just regular stuff that friends do when you're in the business. And to call them friends is amazing.
My own rapping skills are quite good, actually. You get this thing, I think it's called Songify or AutoRap, and you talk into them, and they auto-tune it and make it into a quite interesting musical number. And I got one where it builds it into a rap.
I'd quite like to do a musical. I'd probably have to develop that myself.
I feel like so much of what we give on stage is a musical gift to our fans, but we also wanna bring more depth to our shows if we can and do something empowering.
For me, I just want to continue telling stories - whether it's musically or theatrically, this is what I love to do. So, I want to create more.
Aly and I went through just a long period of time where we just didn't feel creative musically. And, you know, we went through the whole writer's block thing, and we went through having two pretty successful records and figuring out how we want to transition as adults.
There's more to hip-hop than just trying to make everything rhyme, and you find out in life that everything don't rhyme. The music they're cutting is musically fantastic.
Music is more of a hobby to me than my hobbies, if that makes sense. I love music; my dad and brother were very musical, and music just happens to be one of my hobbies that became my vocation.
Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.
To do a musical takes a tremendous amount of energy because you have to act and sing at the same time. And everything has to be precise. Because you can't forget the lyrics because the band keeps playing, you know, and you're under a certain amount of pressure.
We can't recreate Woodstock, nor do we want to. We want to turn its notoriety into a place where we can shape controlled, scaled-down musical events of all sorts.
I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
When I first started working at Disney animation, I can't tell you how many people said to me, 'Oh, man, take a powder.' Nobody takes animated musicals seriously. I swear.
Whatever I gain from writing lyrics, I feel I lose a little bit for the musical aspect by having that lyrical burden on me. But when I'm liberated from worrying about the words, frankly, I feel I'm a better composer.
Any musical form that has been around long enough to have cultural resonance beyond just being a cutting edge kind of communication - but, especially, when it begins to reflect on a time and reflect on a culture - is effective in a musical.
Movies, there are moments when you're writing a song or demoing, a moment in the recording studio. Musicals much more just eat up your life for a certain period of time.
What brought me to Disney was the new regime, which is now the old regime - came over with Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg - and all these people really wanted to reinvigorate the animated musical, so they came to Howard Ashman and me. That was my entry into Disney.
Truth be told, of course, what I enjoy most is reinventing myself and doing new projects where I work in new genres, or I get to find what the voice of a particular musical is.
A villain number is a very valuable thing to have, but if you look at most musicals, one way or another there's an antagonist number.
The reality is that people need to be coaxed toward a musical. They need to understand why it's a musical.
Most successful musicals need to attach themselves to something bigger than themselves, a concept that will make people feel immediately connected to it.
Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much, you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.
I was a student in London in the '70s, so CBGB really wasn't on my radar at all. Obviously, I was aware of the emergence of the Police in England and as an art student, I was very aware of David Byrne, but I suppose my musical taste at that time certainly didn't stretch towards the Dead Boys or the Ramones.
I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.
England in the '60s and the '70s was everything that history has said; it was phenomenally exciting, musically.
