School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I knew I wanted to be in music, but I didn't know my role, so I did everything from interning at Rolling Stone to writing heavy metal fanzines to playing in a high-school band, and I think all those things probably helped in a way.
Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.
When I finished school, I didn't continue to go to university, because I decided I wanted to do music.
By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.
It was clear from the beginning that I was going to be a musician.
Music was the first thing I did where I was naturally talented.
When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I'd discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.
I was crazy for music as a high school kid and a college kid.
I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
Strangely enough, through all those school years I decided at 13 or 14 I was going to be a musician and so school was just something to get out of the way, a waste of time and not to bother with it.