The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.
Somewhere during the 'Next to Normal' Broadway run, I found myself learning more about myself onstage than in real life, and I truly realized the beautiful, tremendous, extraordinary gift that is performing.
That's the beautiful thing about being an artist, is you can take risks and take chances and hopefully be secure enough to just keep going with it if you fall flat on your face.
A career like mine as an actor has a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes you wonder if you're not wasting your time trying to carve out a space for yourself in this crazy entertainment industry.
I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.
When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.
Whenever I write a new song, it always happens when I come back from Europe or Egypt or something like that. It's always from travelling.
How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
A secondhand wardrobe hand clothes doesn't make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, or HIV. I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay doesn't make one witty... the only thing that makes one an artist is making art.
I've always been doing some sort of art. I started off, when I was very young, painting.
Then I became interested in drama, and almost by accident, I drifted into film.
I wanted to become an illustrator as a child.
People who are creative, who do it as a lifestyle, it's kind of silly to make that claim you're done, because you just never know when that spark is going to hit you again. You can't necessarily predict how you're going to feel. In ten years I'll be 58, and I might still feel like making a punk record.
When we first began, we didn't have any hits.
I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.
Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.
Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.
If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.
When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.
The whole time I've been an actor, from early in Houston, my goal has been to work - to keep doing it. I feel at my most satisfied as a human being when I'm working on a role.
I think of me being a painter eventually.
For me, filmmaking is not exactly a career. I was never in it for Hollywood or anything. My films are markers of where I am in life, where I am in my head. So that's what I'm working on, and I try to keep things in proportion - life and filmmaking. One feeds into the other.
I started off in comedy, but that's just where I got my work. I've always been an actor.
Most of the songs I've written have painted a picture on how I have evolved, what I see in people, what inspires me.
