The only thing that mattered to me with 'Xen' was setting things up against each other in an uncomfortable way. If there's a really soft piece of music, and then you're hit by a painful explosive sound, your brain does this funny somersault trying to make sense of why this happened. And at that very moment, your brain is malleable.
The only thing as a kid that really mattered to me was that I wouldn't quit. When I say 'quit,' I mean you wake up, you go to the piano, you go to whatever instrument, and you work at learning how to tell the truth.
I was so dedicated to generating income to keep my family housed and clothed and schooled. That mattered to me. And playing good golf mattered to me. The rest of the things, like how my record stacked up against others, never made that much difference.
I was a skeleton compared to what I used to be, but it didn't matter. Nothing really mattered except remaining unbroken.
Lester is the Rock of Gibraltar. Nothing can rattle him. I am not. I was always flying off the handle about things. And the one person who could calm me down and make me realize that none of this silliness mattered was Lester Holt.
I felt disconnected from the decisions made in Washington and, to be honest, really didn't think my vote mattered because I didn't have a direct line of sight from my vote to a result.
After graduation, I discovered that I'd hit the limit of what I could learn from the women in my family. On top of that, in the workforce, all of the things that mattered in college suddenly weren't enough.
The first time I arrived in Hollywood for the Grammy Awards, I thought I'd bump into people who mattered, such as Ry Cooder or Randy Newman. I was disappointed to see the people I'd always thought of as pop stars. They would charge around the stage rather than enjoy the music.
The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.
I'm such a perfectionist. I can be like, 'This has to be like this. And this, and this and this.' But then you realize a lot of things that you thought mattered, they really don't matter.
