Indian weddings are elaborate. As a culture, we like to celebrate everything... Our weddings go on for sometimes a week, 10 days.
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
I have no secrets; all of these things have been discussed at length in guitar magazines over the years but are far too elaborate to cover in one article.
Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.
My mom has a tape from when I was, like, 2 years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that's really elaborate about werewolves and wolves.
I just go out and sing my songs. I don't put on elaborate stage shows with ridiculous fancy dress.
When I finally came to the United States, I was forced to get a job right away. I spoke no English - none. I started working as an aesthetician in this beautiful boutique salon in Beverly Hills. Being an aesthetician didn't require an elaborate vocabulary in English. My first client was Cindy Crawford! I swear.
When one puts up a building one makes an elaborate scaffold to get everything into its proper place. But when one takes the scaffold down, the building must stand by itself with no trace of the means by which it was erected. That is how a musician should work.
Weddings are super expensive. It is difficult to make money, but it flows out in weddings. Everybody wants it so elaborate without realizing it. People take loans to impress people. We didn't want to do that.
My go-go dancing was not your typical go-go dancing: I really was doing performance art. I would do dramatic, elaborate lyricals across the bar. I learned a lot, actually, as an artist during that time.
