I do consider myself to be a positive person. I'd much rather have my energy be focused on trying to make the world a better place, than to be bitter or negative.

I really think music in school is vital. Some pivotal moments in my life were my childhood scholastic experiences with music - teachers who found out I could sing, and encouraged me, or teachers who turned me on to music or bands I hadn't yet heard.

I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too.

The experience of playing music at a young age really opens up one's mind to different melody in life itself, literally - like, when you've even played a recorder, or whatever, it becomes a lot easier to hear the beauty in a bird's song, or the quiet tune in a gentle rustle of the wind.

I think too many times people can get rigid in life, put our blinders on, get locked into one way of thinking, and forget that life has many flavors to savor.

I've never lost track of what I stand for and what I believe in. I'm proud of that.

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.