I truly cherish the time and experience with friends that I have been making music with for so many years, even decades now.

I'd promised my parents that I'd go to college, take the time to grow up a bit, and experience something different before really pursuing music.

My experience and growth in the film music world and the time I've spent studying legendary film composers have given me depth of insight into how music can inspire a range of emotions.

I know my ticket is vulnerability. Most people point to some emotional experience, some hardship, some high or low when they talk about my music... a time when they need to feel those feelings more.

I think that music, being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is happening - the whole of human experience at the particular time that it is being expressed.

I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later.

I've always had a fascination for everything surrounding things that are unexplainable. Not surprising that my first movie was a horror film, even though, of course, at the time I had no experience writing horror music.

Obviously, any living musician born after 1960 has been touched by rock and roll. It's the music of our time, and it's 'in the air,' as Steve Reich would say. My experience of it is just really direct because I'm actually playing in a collaborative band.

I think, having done 'The Princess Diaries,' it was a fun experience, and it's cool to have made fans that are now into all this music. That movie is still so relevant to our culture. It's always on. It's kind of a rare, nostalgic thing. I get tweets all the time about it.

I had 10 years of lessons at the conservatory in Belgium, studying classical music. I learned how to sing, play the piano, and all the theory that I needed. By the time I left, I had confidence in my skills, and I knew that the experience had prepared me to become a real professional.

I do feel pressure from the outside world a little bit just because everybody wants new music, which is really nice. It just proves that everybody likes what I'm doing. But at the same time, I feel like it's important to just chill and experience things and really make the songs true to me.

People in Seattle - and I'm speaking from experience - are indoors more. It used to just rain a ton, and as a result, you'd be inside listening to music all the time and playing. You'd all rehearse at each other's houses and share ideas. There was no competition. When I got to L.A., I was really stunned by the competition.

Whether for company or isolation or just to make it a pleasurable experience, I have music in my ears all the time. I tend to listen to the same things, so I don't really pay too much attention to it. But it's there, and it's nice, and I do pay more attention to it than I probably should. I think, 'How can I use this music in something?'

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