It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.
I feel like we cheated... because you read about these other directors, just like, 'Damn! They paid dues for 10 years before they got to get behind the camera.' We cheated because technology was in the right place at the right time, and we were alive at the right age at the right time for us to take advantage of that.
One must pass through the circumference of time before arriving at the center of opportunity.
When will you learn that the time to buy a thing is when you find what you want? If you go back the next year and try to get more, they will try to sell you something else.
If you were to ask me when I was 17 if I was mad because I didn't have a deal, I would have probably said, 'Yeah.' Now I'm so glad I got it when I got it. People tell you to be patient and wait. Patience is not a virtue of mine, but I think everything definitely happened the right way for me.
The things that are correct for me will come to me at the time that I am interested in them and have the capacity, the understanding, to do them.
To convince people to back your idea, you've got to sell it to yourself and know when it's the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It's like surfing. You don't create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.
Being a singer, it's feast or famine. You have to hit it when it's hot.
Obviously, I've been very lucky in general in my career, but I feel that I've been very lucky in terms of having directors come along at the right times who have taken me to the next level of where I needed to be.
I'm kind of grateful that I didn't have any real success until I was older and basically out of high school. I think that was a real confidence boost for me, having it all start that way, in that very privileged position of having him vouch for me.
I used to have a theory in my mind that if no serious move had happened before I was 38 - not 40, oddly - then I would move into management or something. Fortunately, I was offered 'The Frost Report' when I was 37, so that was a close thing, too.
For people like me, I think it is more about, 'When do people give you an opportunity?' rather than you deciding about when you want to make a debut. If I had a chance, I would have come as a child artist in this industry.
