I love my life and my mistakes and my triumphs - all of it.
Outside of a couple of times I ran without eating right or being too tired, I always feel great after I run.
Running opened up something beautiful in my life. I try to send the energy all over my body. I love the feeling of it.
Just so people know, the Silverlake Conservatory of Music is not at all about celebrity or fame or being a star. It's an academic music school.
I was on a path that could've really led to disaster, and the one thing for me that really kept me focused and gave me something to believe in and a sense of self-worth and a discipline was music.
When I was in school, you could pick any instrument you want, and they'd teach you how to play it. That changed my life. I loved playing music in school, and it sent me on my path as a musician.
Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works - it's all the same stuff; it's just different aesthetics that we're talking about.
The Silverlake Conservatory is a nonprofit music school in Los Angeles where we teach music, mostly to kids, but to people of all ages - people who are old, people with beards, all kinds of people.
I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn't learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.
I studied music at the most remedial level when I was a kid, through the Los Angeles public schools, with a little private instruction.
I always thought I was a pretty terrible actor.
I love entertaining people, I love playing music, and I love rocking like an animal. But at a certain point, you're playing gig after gig after gig, in town after town after town, and you're lying down, staring at another hotel-room ceiling, and it's like, 'I want to be home. I'm a dad. I've got kids.'
Ethiopia is such a great country, beautiful place.
Music gave me something that was not only good for me - it gave me something to work on, something to be proud of and something that I really loved and have a love for - but also music was good for other people because you put joy into the world.
My father was out of my life when I was pretty young - when I was 7 years old, he was gone. I didn't see him for the rest of my childhood.
I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.
I was raised to think that rock was music for ignorant people who didn't think for themselves.
For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.
When something comes up, and it's interesting, and I have the time, I'll do it.
We always write way more than we put on a record. We always write a lot-lot.
