New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse...
I guess play piano, you know, because that’s the thing I started doing when I was a little kid.
I get terrible reviews everywhere I go.
I think a dad has to make his daughter feel that he’s genuinely interested in what she’s going through.
My Dad is my hero. He’s 85 now and he is in great health. He is handsome and strong. He has an incredible moral and ethical backbone. I couldn’t have been luckier with my parents.
Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.
You have to read scripts and audition and develop relationships. It takes a long time to develop a body of work but over the last 25 years I guess I’ve done that many movies. In hindsight it may seem effortless, but there’s a lot of work that goes into it.
When I’m acting, I’m in a different place, singing is the last thing on my mind, and when I’m on stage, there’s no acting at all involved, not even presentation, it’s just who I am.
When I did the album for ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ I found myself out there in front of this big band, which I had no idea how to do, and they wiped the floor with me. It’s a very specific skill, and I didn’t know how to do it.
The whole ‘American Idol’ way of looking at things is the antithesis of what I grew up with. There are a whole lot of kids wanting to be famous now, whereas if I’d even mentioned that word to one of my teachers, I would have got into a whole load of trouble.
My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven’s mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.
My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early ’70s, when I was 5 years old, my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.
If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that’s a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don’t like the melodies, and vice versa.
I’m sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.
I have no doubt that the government of this great nation will work with its people to lead New Orleans and the Gulf Coast back to an enlightened, proud, safe part of the world.
I live in Connecticut, but eventually I’d like to move back to New Orleans. I grew up there; the pace is a bit slower. Plus, I love crawfish and po’boys.
I mean these people who work on Broadway, in my opinion, are the most gifted of everyone. I mean they really know how to dance. They really know how to act. They really know how to sing. They know how to perform.
I’m not a movie star. People know me, but they don’t necessarily know what they know me for. I get recognised, but it’s not like Justin Bieber. It’s a nice thing, people are cool.
I married my best friend. And I listen! Ultimately I’ve been very fortunate – I understand that that doesn’t happen for everybody but it happened for us and we take it very seriously.
As you work on something, whether it’s a painting or a piece of music, it’s going to evolve. A relationship is like that too.
No matter what genre of music you play when you rack up a couple years of experience, you have your own point of view no matter who it is that is coming in front of you whether it’s a pop artist or a country artist. Whoever.