Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson leads a colorful life. Besides fronting one of the worlds' most iconic metal bands, he's also a commercial pilot, even flying the band to numerous gigs, a competitive fencer, owns a brewing company, has written films and novels, hosted radio shows and he's been working for years on a solo project that's also a comic book series called The Mandrake Project . Editor-In-Chief Joann Butler caught up with him recently at Evergreen Studios in LA to hear all about it and more. This is a LifeMinute with the legendary, Bruce Dickinson.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Bruce Dickinson and you are watching and/or listening to Life Minute, podcast or TV or radio.
00:08 No, not radio. No, that would be so old school.
00:11 [Music]
00:29 Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson leads a colorful life.
00:32 Besides fronting one of the world's most iconic metal bands, he's also a commercial pilot,
00:38 flying the band to numerous gigs, a competitive fencer, owns a brewing company, has written films
00:44 and novels, hosted radio shows, and he's been working for years on a solo project that's also
00:50 a comic book series called The Mandrake Project. We caught up with him recently at Evergreen Studios
00:56 in LA to hear all about it and more. This is a Life Minute with the legendary Bruce Dickinson.
01:03 It's an album and it's a comic/graphic novel. I mean, you know, if you're a kid it's a comic.
01:11 If you're a middle class guy it's a graphic novel because I'm grown up and I don't read comics.
01:18 Right, yeah. But it's a 12 episode comic. The two things are related but not joined at the hip.
01:24 You know, so they're independent, freestanding things. Yet they do share a common culture at
01:31 the roots and things like that but the story of The Mandrake Project, the comic, is not reproduced
01:39 on the album. It's not a literal reproduction of anything like that. So it's not a concept album
01:44 or any one of those type things with Vincent Price narrating it halfway through and all that.
01:49 No, it's not.
01:50 Tell us about the album.
01:51 The album, for me, sounds surprisingly consistent, as in consistently interesting,
01:58 which surprises me even more considering that it took 25 years to put all these things together.
02:06 And the last track on the album is the oldest track. It's 25 years old.
02:13 Save me now, save me now, save me now, save me now, save me from my grave.
02:30 The one before that is like 20 years old and then the first two were written last year.
02:34 I am your very soul, the one you do not know. I am the truth that's playing hide and seek.
02:43 And then the year before that, I came with a bunch of songs and said,
02:48 "Maybe we should do another album." That was 2014. And then the next thing, it's now. And it's like,
02:55 "Okay, well, where were we?" And we just picked up where we left off, wrote two new songs.
03:01 And this album actually has been finished for a year. So it's been a bit frustrating.
03:08 Sounds too negative, but it has been frustrating because you want it to come out because we've
03:14 done it. It's great. Wow. Listen to this. But the ways of the world means it doesn't quite work like
03:20 that. You have to set the release date. You have to work back. You've got to do the press. And
03:24 because we were really keen on doing double vinyl, that has its own time pressures. Vinyl is a
03:34 scarce commodity in terms of acquiring it, getting the numbers you need for the pressings and
03:39 everything. And that's a whole different cycle of things. But the album cover, the single cover,
03:47 all of that, I wanted to make as like a kind of enigmatic piece of art that people would
03:53 look at it and handle it and go, "What's going on in that picture?" And they are pictures. They're
03:58 not Photoshop. Although we're using all this digital stuff to record things on, it's still a
04:03 very kind of analog album. And in fact, the stage show, when we take the band out, people say, "Oh,
04:10 what's the stage show going to be like?" Because obviously Maiden, we have big scary monsters and
04:15 big, huge things and pyrotechnics and all the rest of it. I said, "Well, this thing is, it's
04:22 not back to 1992. It's not back to 1982. It's more like here we are in 1972. What was going on then?"
04:29 But people who listen to the album, they get that. They go, "Oh, why that's so, so cool. So you mean
04:35 it's just music?" I went, "Yes, it's music and everything else. And we don't have any weird,
04:41 funny little monsters." An eternity has failed. Is that the old one you're talking about?
04:46 The last thing that happened after we, one, finished mixing the album and two, I got the comic
04:54 accepted at Z2, the last thing I had to do was come up with a title for the record and the comic.
05:01 I wanted the same title, that both would share the same title. And I didn't have one. I'd done
05:09 this whole album. I did not have a title. Well, I did, but I couldn't use it anymore. So the title
05:17 was originally going to be "If Eternity Should Fail."
05:20 [Music]
05:29 Now, because Maiden used that track, it was my intention to kind of repossess the track.
05:34 But because the story had moved on of the comic, I changed some of the words. I changed some of the
05:41 verse lyric to make it reflect a bit more the story of the comic. And I thought, well,
05:46 "Eternity Has Failed," which is great. It works with the end of episode one of the comic. But
05:52 "If Eternity Should Fail" is kind of out of date now as a title. What the hell am I going to call
05:57 the record? You know, I mean, "If Eternity Should Fail" was actually an episode of "Doctor Strange."
06:02 That came from comics in the first place. "Mandrake Project" as a title came up because I
06:08 thought, well, what? What do I want people to have as a reaction? One, if they see that as the title
06:16 of a comic. And two, if they see something as the title of an album. The one thing I thought about
06:21 "Mandrake Project" for the comic is it looks a bit conspiratorial. I quite liked it for that reason.
06:29 But then when I put the same thing on the record and allied it with the photographs and the cover
06:36 art, it looked and felt like to me that it was a kind of a bit of a puzzle. It was a bit of an
06:43 enigma. It's like, so you pick it up and go, "That's really cool, but what is it?"
06:49 There's the perfect way to approach a record. You know, you buy a record, you know exactly what's
06:55 going to be on it. Why bother? But you buy a record and you open it up and go, "Oh, what's this all
07:00 about? What's this? Oh my God, why is he in a graveyard? What's he thinking?" And that goes
07:06 back to when I was a kid and I had, I think everybody did this with the very first Black
07:12 Sabbath album. And there's this amazing photograph that ended up being one of the most enigmatic
07:18 pictures, I think, in rock and roll history. And people stared at that picture for hours going,
07:23 "What is she doing in there?" It's just an infrared picture. And I think the woman who looks
07:28 mysterious and she's wearing a cowl, I mean, she was like the tea lady or something. You know what
07:32 I mean? And they just said, "Go and stand in that field over there." And it all just kind of worked.
07:37 We had a couple of shots like that, that we did. And we did one photo session in one day
07:42 and got so many great photographs. And one of them was in, that's the back cover,
07:50 it's like, "Oh, that's it." And the centerfold, similar. But I was dead set, no Photoshop
07:57 on any of those because it disturbs the belief. You know it's fake because you know that it's
08:04 obviously fake. And kids can spot that now because they can do this stuff on their home computers.
08:08 And your solo work, how is that different for you? And why did you want to do this?
08:14 I can travel to all kinds of different musical universes. Obviously, all basically within the
08:20 genre of rock music. But that's a pretty broad church. I mean, when I was growing up, it was.
08:27 Now it's narrowed down. If you go to radio stations, like satellite radio stations and
08:35 stuff like that, you're sort of like, "Oh, I see there's 150 stations and they're all playing
08:40 entirely separate categories of music." Which I find just kind of annoying because it's quite
08:49 frustrating actually, in that people have been able to identify and, what's the word, segment
08:57 different chunks of the audience. For me, music was growing up was completely the opposite.
09:03 Was that there were no boundaries to what you could listen to. So if you wanted to listen
09:11 to Motorhead one minute and ZZ Top the next and Django Reinhardt the next and then Genesis the
09:16 next and Jethro Tull, what's the problem with that? There is no problem with that.
09:20 And the culmination of all that ends up basically being the Mandrake Project.
09:27 So we know who your inspirations were. You just need to drop them, I think.
09:31 I dropped a few of them, but no, but you could chuck in Deep Purple and Arthur Brown and Black
09:37 Sabbath and Van der Graaff Generator and all these weird ass, some of the weird ass bands.
09:43 I was lucky in that the back end of the 60s, like Hendrix and all that stuff, was very present,
09:51 you know, at the beginning of the 70s. And then the 70s took it to levels of technical expertise
09:59 that people in the 60s couldn't really dream about. And that kind of dovetailed for me with
10:05 punk because I was at university in the East End of London when punk was going on. I wasn't
10:13 implacably opposed to punk, but I saw it as being more of an art school type thing
10:22 than a musical thing. I get why it's a look and it's kind of a musical look as well. But beyond
10:31 that, beyond one album, where does it go? And the answer is it can't go anywhere because, you know,
10:39 musicians want to progress with music. Punks were not interested in particularly progressing with
10:46 music. So it didn't take long for the music industry to subvert itself, you know, and get
10:54 back down to it. But I was always like into rock music. Rock music has never thought of itself
11:02 collectively as a group of fans or bands. It's never thought of itself as being pop,
11:09 pop as in ephemeral pop, as in disposable. It's like we're always looking for eternity.
11:19 Yeah, it's funny. Did you always know you wanted to be a musician?
11:23 No, I had no idea. I mean, when I was a kid, I dreamed about being an astronaut.
11:29 I would settle for astronaut, fighter pilot, submarine commander, tank commander, any of those
11:35 things, you know, and then didn't get into music really until I was like 13, whatever, when 14.
11:44 I had a couple of records, but I didn't have there was no music really in the house. Dad used to
11:51 play occasionally. I mean, he had some weird, he had some record like Edith Piaf and Frankie Lane.
11:58 I like Edith Piaf.
11:59 Both actually, actually now. I mean, it takes you years to overcome ignorance and prejudice,
12:06 you know, and so there I am listening to Edith Piaf going, she's actually really cool, you know,
12:10 funny enough, as is Frankie Lane, you know, because he does some, he did some great stuff.
12:15 I mean, 310 to Yuma is a classic, you know, I mean, the film soundtrack track, but it's the
12:20 original 310 to Yuma song sung by Frankie Lane, I think. And it's brilliant, you know, and he's
12:26 kind of a precursor to that whole Johnny Cash thing, which again, was something I came to later,
12:31 realizing, you know, just what a genius he was. It sounds weird for a heavy metal singer to say,
12:36 but unplug your prejudices and, you know, leave your ego at the door and go, this is great.
12:42 When did you realize you had this voice?
12:44 When I got fired from being a drummer in my band. I wanted to be a drummer, you know, I mean,
12:51 because I was one of these kids that was always bouncing off the wall. I mean, these days,
12:56 I would probably, they'd take one look at me and they'd play "Medicate Me at Birth", right?
13:02 I decided that drums was the way to go, because it was a physical instrument. You were banging
13:08 and clattering and making a lot of noise and stuff like that. But the logistics of carrying a drum
13:15 kit around, I thought, that's a pain in the ass. So I started out on bongos. I borrowed a pair of
13:21 bongos from the school music room and we had this little kind of band of a couple of guitar players,
13:27 the bass player and me on the bongos. We were massacring "Let It Be" by The Beatles on bongos.
13:33 And the guy that was the singer, he allocated himself the job because he was in the school
13:38 choir, but he had a bass voice. And so he got to the chorus and he couldn't do it. It was like,
13:44 "Woo, woo, woo, woo." And they said, "Shut up on the bongos. You're giving us a headache. Your
13:49 hands are starting to bleed." And anyway, so give him a hand with a vocal. I was like, "Yeah,
13:55 how's it go?" He goes up, "Let it be, yeah. Let it be. Yeah. Let it be." I said, "Should I be
14:02 writing this down?" And he said, "Yes." And then let me guess, "Let it be." He said, "No.
14:08 Whisper words of wisdom. Let it be." And two things happened at that point. I thought,
14:12 "This is like simple shit. I mean, if you can write stuff like this and make millions, why be
14:17 a drummer? Be a singer, man." So I had a go and boom, they went, "Oh, you're the singer." And
14:24 then we went downstairs and we split up artistic differences. And then I got kicked out of that
14:30 school and turned up to another school, which was near where I lived. It was a boarding school I
14:36 got kicked out of. How old were you? I was like 17. I was 17. And so I'm 17 years old and I'm at
14:46 this other school, which is like a regular school. It's just like a regular type of high school type
14:50 school. In my class were these three or four guys at the back and they're chatting away. And I hear
14:59 this voice going, "We haven't got a singer for the rehearsal tonight. What are we going to do?
15:02 Because he's quit. Oh my God, no singer." And I went, "Shall I? Shall I?" And I said, "I sing a
15:09 bit." They went, "Really?" I went, "Yeah." "Well, you're in then." That was it. I mean,
15:14 it properly was a garage band. They played in their father's garage. We did that. We did two
15:19 gigs in total in our career. Yeah. So we did a couple of shows in pubs and then I went to
15:26 university. And then I got a bill from the taxman for the two shows because we'd changed on the
15:36 band's name initially was Paradox. I went, "That's a terrible name. No, I need something epic."
15:43 I said, "What about Sticks?" They went, "Sticks?" He goes, "Isn't there another band called Sticks?"
15:49 I went, "They won't mind." Yeah. So Sticks. But what had happened was that the real band Sticks
15:57 had come into town and done some shows in the UK, like town halls and things like that.
16:04 And obviously left and somebody had gone, "There's some money. Where is Sticks based?" And somebody
16:11 went, "Oh, look, here's a band called Sticks. They come from Sheffield." And my parents got the bill
16:17 of like about 2000 bucks for Sticks, the big American band. So obviously we sorted that out,
16:26 but it was funny, man. I mean, so yeah. And then I was at university and I started a band with some
16:33 friends and we did a few more gigs. I was getting quite serious at this point. So we're doing that.
16:38 And then I moved around and joined another band and finally got headhunted out of that band
16:46 into joining a band called Samson, who had an album deal. And I recorded my first album
16:52 with them. I did two albums with them, arguably two, well, two studio albums that completely
17:00 with them. And then out of that, I got headhunted into Iron Maiden. Amazing. What did your parents
17:08 think of all that? My dad was a bit weird about music. So I mean, I think he was secretly,
17:14 you know, quite, you know, quite proud of it by the time I got to Maiden. But of course,
17:20 I never told anybody that I was going to be in a rock and roll band. I just lied. I went,
17:24 "I'm going to go to university in London to go and study history because it might be useful."
17:28 But I had no intention of doing that. You know, in fact, the college tried to throw me out twice
17:34 for not doing any work, you know. So you dropped out?
17:38 No, I threatened to sue them and I stayed in. It was just complete. I can't believe I did that. I
17:45 mean, I don't know how you did it. Back in the day, it was, they were so frightened of the student
17:49 union and they had lawyers and everything else like that. I had two things against me, two
17:54 strikes against me. One is that they alleged I'd done no work, which was true. And the other one
17:59 was that I hadn't paid any rent, which was also true because I had a grant from the government
18:07 to go to college and I'd spent all of the grant buying a PA system for my band. So I just used
18:14 to hide when the rent man came around. So I owed all this back rent. They said, "We're going to
18:19 throw you out for academic insufficiency and non-payment of rent." So I went, "Hang on a minute,
18:29 that's two separate departments there and you're putting it all in the same letter? Is this a
18:34 conspiracy? You're conspiring against me. You can't do that. You can't throw somebody out of an
18:40 academic institution. You can take them to court and say, "I want the money," but you can't get
18:44 thrown out for not paying rent. And you put those two things together, what it looks like is that
18:50 you're out to get me. So I'll get the lawyer on and you don't want all that bad publicity, do you?
18:56 So I had six long essays that I had to do about whatever it was, Spanish Civil War or something.
19:05 I did them in two weeks, but I stayed in. I stayed in. I was just like, "It's at the end of
19:11 the second year. I'll figure out how to pay the rent, but you can't throw me out for that." And
19:16 in any case, the guy goes, "I think you should take a sabbatical for a year." I went, "No,
19:21 I'm not going to do that because if I do that, I'll never come back." I said, "So I'm going to
19:25 get my degree the same as everybody else because it's all sit-down exams at the end." There was
19:32 like two weeks of written sit-down exams. So hey, that's a level playing field.
19:39 How long after that until you just exploded?
19:41 About two years.
19:44 Oh my God. Amazing.
19:45 So I got out of college. I did my final exam in the morning and then I turned up to rehearse with
19:53 Samson in the afternoon. And that was it. I was off. And we were-
19:57 Oh, that's Samson.
19:58 I mean, Samson, it was- If you're going to make all your mistakes in the music industry,
20:03 just try and do them in a concentrated space of time. And we did. But then out of that, I had this
20:12 kind of reputation as a singer. And I knew the guys in Maiden because we had links to each other.
20:17 So the drummer from Samson, Clyde Burr, had left shortly before I joined and joined Iron Maiden.
20:26 So we were next door to each other in a recording studio and Maiden were doing Killers and we were
20:32 doing an album called Shock Tactics. And we would all go and hang out in the studio bar and chat
20:37 and stuff. Lo and behold, they were having difficulties with their first singer. And I was
20:43 doing a festival gig at Reading Festival with Samson. There were all these rumours, I mean,
21:02 festival rumours, all these rumours flying around. Because at the time, I think Rainbow
21:08 fired Ronnie James Dio. I got a bizarre call. I was in my girlfriend's apartment. The phone rang
21:15 and it was Ritchie Blackmore's guitar roadie. And I went, "How do you know I was here?" He goes,
21:21 "I was a friend of a friend." He said, "Are you interested in the job?" I went, "Well, yeah!"
21:26 You know, and that was the last I heard of it. That was it, you know, and didn't hear anymore.
21:33 You know, so I think, well, that was odd, you know, very strange. So anyway, Maiden, it was
21:38 different. I got a kind of an interview with the manager that night after the festival.
21:42 - That's the history.
21:44 - Bit of a grilling, you know. And so, yeah, and I explained that I'd love to be in Maiden,
21:49 but I was not going to be like the previous guy in terms of style or in terms of opinions,
21:57 as in I had a lot of opinions. And you're either going to get used to it or you're going to fire
22:05 me in the first five minutes. So tell me now, because I can save you the bother of firing me.
22:10 Just do it now. Otherwise, I'm going to be a pain in the ass, but for all the right reasons.
22:14 And kind of, there you go, lead singer syndrome, you know.
22:17 - That's awesome. And the rest is history.
22:20 - Yeah.
22:20 - Oh, I got it on a story. Creatively, what's the process like for you?
22:25 - In everything I do, whether it's writing the comic script or whether it's writing
22:31 film stuff or writing treatments for videos, I always look for the story. What's the story?
22:38 Why are we doing this? And I do that with songs as well. People always usually ask the question,
22:48 you know, "Ah, so how do you write a song? What comes first, the music or the lyrics?"
22:53 And the truth is, it doesn't matter. Something comes first. It doesn't matter what it is. I mean,
23:00 it could be a sound. You know, it could be somebody picks up a guitar and just plays
23:07 some random, bulk standard chord that everybody plays on the guitar.
23:12 - Oh, something like that.
23:14 - It's just the sound of that particular guitar on that particular day. And you suddenly go,
23:20 "Ding!" And a little phrase or thing will just pop into your head. And then you can conceal your
23:27 story. You can have fun with it then. Because then you said, "We don't have to be obvious in
23:31 telling this story." People could have to chip away at it and find out what it's like. So I
23:36 love using allegory if I can. What I aspire to in terms of lyric writing is, yeah, it's going to
23:42 work with the actual sound of the words that come out of your mouth, you know, that's why they're
23:47 lyrics. But if you can also tell a story and be poetic as well as lyrical, there you go. That's
23:57 the holy grail. You don't always get there. - Across the shining seas, eyes of creatures
24:05 follow me. Moonlight guides us on our steady course.
24:15 How do you hone your voice? - Oh, yes.
24:18 - Undeniable legendary voice of yours. - I wish I could say that there's some
24:24 magic routine that I do every morning when I get up and, you know, up with a lark. I'm like,
24:29 "I'm...", like that. But no, you know, my voice sounds horrible the same as everybody else's
24:37 voice sounds horrible first thing in the morning, you know. I did spend a lot of time when I was
24:41 younger teaching myself things that probably you get taught if you go to a singing teacher.
24:48 So I just spent a lot of time researching the voice and things. And then I asked a bit of advice
24:54 from one or two people. And then I just tried to emulate, first of all, other voices. And I figured
25:00 out what voices I could sound like naturally, which I think is what most people do. As soon
25:06 as you start playing any instrument, you imitate people you admire. And if you can imitate somebody
25:12 you admire and you sound pretty close to them, you think, "Oh, yes. Isn't that great?" Actually,
25:19 in the end, it's not because you actually have to find your own identity. That's the bit that
25:24 can be troublesome. And actually having a technically good voice is an obstacle to that
25:32 because it's easy to sound like quite a few other people. And therefore, it's difficult to find out
25:41 who you are. If you have a voice that is restricted in some way, you accommodate that within your
25:49 style immediately. And therefore, you become very characteristic straight off the bat.
25:54 So rock music is different in that respect. I had a moment back in Samson, funnily enough,
26:02 and I was working with a producer called Tony Platt, who'd just come off doing the AC/DC record
26:08 Back in Black with Mutt Langer producing that. We had this material with Samson, and he made me
26:15 sing what I considered out of my normal range. That's what I did. And it was a bit challenging,
26:23 but everybody who heard that record went, "Wow, that's great. You sound like you."
26:30 And I went, "I hate sounding like me. Who is that person?" They said, "That's you.
26:35 That's your voice." So I learnt to be myself on the record and turned it back into being myself
26:45 live. And then I joined Iron Maiden. And I joined Iron Maiden, and I now had this palette of voice
26:54 that I could bring there. And I had all these ideas about what I could do to really... Because
27:00 it's kind of almost like mock operatic type stuff at this point. And I thought that would be super
27:06 cool to do that amount of aggression with that kind of big voice. So that's kind of how the
27:14 concept of me singing with them worked. And your cancer scare, you're a survivor.
27:20 That must have been... That's one of those, "Oh, really? Okay." And the weird thing was,
27:27 I just finished an album with it. And you didn't know? I kind of did know, but I chose not to know
27:34 until I finished the record. I was having little funny little things. I mean, I wasn't losing
27:40 weight or anything else like that, but I was always a tiny little bit sweaty at night. And
27:45 I had a lump in the side of my neck, a little one, just like when you get a flu and your gland comes
27:52 up. Two weeks later, I finished the album, go see the doctor. And within a week, I'm in front of the
27:58 oncologist and says, "Yep, there you go." He said, "So we're going to get rid of it for you with
28:05 chemo and radiation and sign here." I went, "I'll sign up to that." It sounds dramatic. I was stage
28:12 three. My oncologist said to me, he said, "I'd rather have stage three of your cancer than stage
28:16 one lung cancer." I went, "Okay, that puts it into perspective." I said, "But why? Please tell me,
28:23 why me?" Here I am all like Mr. Fit and Healthy and running around and doing this. Why me? Is it
28:32 some karma? Is it a bad person? He goes, "No, it's just bad luck." So I had a golf ball in the base
28:39 of my tongue. I had a three and a half centimeter tumor living there. I had a two and a half,
28:44 I had a strawberry growing there. And 33 sessions of radiation and nine weeks of chemo at the same
28:52 time. It was almost like an out of the body experience because the level of fatigue at the
28:56 end of it from the radiation was extraordinary. Like nothing I'd ever felt before. People used
29:02 to ask me, "Were you worried that you wouldn't be able to sing again?" I said, "Well, no, because
29:08 the first thing was to be alive again. And then the next thing after that is, okay, what can I do?"
29:14 And it's that kind of positive spin on things. Don't say, "I can't do X, Y, and Z anymore.
29:23 Therefore, I'm all washed up." No. What can you do? That was my attitude as I was doing in doing
29:33 the recovery phase was don't panic, wait, and just wait. And then after about 10 months, I was just
29:44 wandering around and I felt pretty good wandering around the kitchen at home and nobody there. And I
29:50 just thought, "Let's have a go now." And it was there. I was like, "Oh my God, it's there. Let's
29:59 have a go at the top notes and run to the hills. Oh my God, they're there. It's all there." In fact,
30:05 some of it was better than it was before. It was so weird. I was prepared to do whatever I could
30:11 do with my voice after it. Nobody loses their voice. They might lose the ability to sing in a
30:19 particular way, but you never lose a voice. As long as you have something to say, you always have
30:26 a voice. I love it. The gloom and doom of some of the lyrics. Oh yeah. The album's dark. I mean,
30:33 the comic book is darker still. But you're not like that. So where does it come from? No, I'm
30:37 not. It comes from things that have happened to me in my life and things that have happened to
30:41 other people. A lot of the album is about life and death. And I've had a lot of life and death
30:47 in my life and potential death and people who have actually died and things. That leaves scars
30:56 inside. I don't go around wearing my heart on my sleeve telling people about
31:03 because whatever things have hurt me or hurt other people, I own it. I own it. I'm not going
31:14 to inflict it on other people. It's not their stuff. It's my stuff. Own it. Get on with the
31:20 future. Don't live in the past. Respect the old ways for what they were, but that's not now, is
31:27 it? Now is like right now. So that's not going to help you right now. And living in the future
31:33 isn't going to help you right now. Oh yeah. One day, someday my prince will come. Well,
31:39 he or she is not here right now. So right now is what's in front of you. And live for right now.
31:47 I don't know if there's a God. I don't know. People want to believe in a God. Fantastic.
31:53 This life is all you've got. If it's not, it's a bonus. But this life is all you've got to live it
32:01 every day. And life is better than all the other options on the table.
32:05 What does music do for people?
32:07 It can do all kinds of things. It can piss them off. It can make them angry. It can make them cry.
32:11 But what it does is it gives them an escape. If I listen to a piece of music and I'm absorbed in
32:21 the music, the world dissolves around you and you're there. The other thing that music does,
32:29 which is I think unique amongst, I'll get shot down, somebody else say, oh no, this does it or
32:36 that does it. But no, I think music uniquely transports you across time. So for example,
32:44 things I listened to when I was 13 or 14 years old, if I listened to that track now, I am 13,
32:52 14 years old, I can picture the scene where I was when it was happening. Music is the only thing
32:59 that does that. That doesn't happen with a movie. It doesn't happen with plays. It doesn't happen
33:05 with books. But music is like a direct, it's like a direct plug-in to the brain of the cosmos
33:16 that has all of that stuff in it. And music can do that.
33:20 To hear more of this interview, visit our podcast,
33:24 Life Minute TV on iTunes and all streaming podcast platforms.
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