I was speaking to Ridley Scott the other day and he makes a film every 18 months. He's amazing really.
Television is a business and, financially speaking, they have decisions and considerations that go far beyond the creative merit of the show. But at the same time, you'd like to believe in a man's word. When he shakes your hand and says he's going to stay with it, and doesn't, it's really frustrating in a way.
I've performed in Japan before, as well as many other non-English speaking countries. I find you really just have to be a bit more animated than usual. Call-and-response routines work well, if they are simple. Otherwise, I just dance around like a circus monkey and hope the crowd feels it.
I felt completely at home in Mexico - speaking Spanish to my cousins, running around Acapulco and stuffing my face with mole and homemade tortillas. Mexico opened my heart.
I know what it takes to move cities forward. It's not about rhetoric and great speaking, but it takes relationships.
If you are in Bangkok, you will find that people there will never speak to you without joining their hands. It's not that they are speaking to you like that because you are tourists. They even speak at their home like that.
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.
It is a very serious consideration for a lyricist to step in there and suggest the meaning to a song. The music is speaking for itself.
A lot of Latinos are like me: third generation, English speaking.
I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.
