No one wants to hear me crooning a ballad.

Once George Washington said, "I have to step down the so the country can move on."

Lamplighters are the guys who manually turned on all the street lamps in London and turned them off. That was the gig in the 1930s in London.

[Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.

I got to fall in love. I got to win a war. I got to write words that inspired a nation.

My sister is as responsible for anyone for giving me good taste in music.

I grew up in the time just when cassettes were waning and CDs were growing. And so mix tapes - and not mix CDs - mix tapes were an important part of the friendship and mating rituals of New York adolescents. If you were a girl and I wanted you - to show you I like you, I would make you a 90-minute cassette wherein I would show off my tastes. I would play you a musical theater song next to a hip-hop song next to an oldie next to some pop song you maybe never heard, also subliminally telling you how much I like you with all these songs.