“That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have”
DOWN TO EARTH
I wrote the song “Down to Earth” a few years ago, and I was really excited to record it for the My World album. It’s a huge fan favorite. So many people feel where I’m coming from. It doesn’t need any spectacular stage effects in the touring show; the best thing I can do is just sing it straight from my heart. I’m not afraid to show my emotions; if you love someone, you should tell them. If you think a girl is beautiful, you should say that. Usher says some songs work best when there’s a sob in the singer’s voice. You gotta let that deep feeling come through. And that’s how I felt about this song. Sometimes the emotion of it is enough to bring tears to my eyes.
No one has a solid answer.
We’re just walking in the dark.
And you can see the look on my face,
It just tears me apart...
So we fight through the hurt
And we cry and cry and cry and cry
And we live and we learn
And we try and try and try and try
“‘Look for the good,’ Grandpa says”
At the end of the day, families are what they are. If you feel like a freak because you don’t have a normal family, I’ve got news for you: pretty much nobody does. In fact, I don’t know if there’s any such thing as a “normal” family, and if there is, they’d probably be the most boring people ever. Or the scariest. Seriously, it would be creepy to even have dinner with the Perfect Family. The whole time you’d be thinking they can’t be this perfect, they’re probably holding the butcher’s knife under the table ready to kill me, or they’ve got a mailman chained up in the basement or something. All families – even the ones that seem perfect on the outside – have their issues to some degree. What counts is how you handle it.
“Look for the good,” Grandpa says.
In our family, all the kids know they’re loved, and, for the most part, everybody’s able to just get over themselves and be cool. You just love and accept everybody as they are. You forgive others and hope that others will forgive you, because God forgives us all six hundred times a day, and he doesn’t sit around busting heads about it.
So it’s up to you and it’s up to me
That we meet in the middle
On our way back down to earth...
My dad was away at work a lot of the time, and, yeah, that sucked for me sometimes. It sucked for him, too. But in life you realize that the world’s not perfect and if it had been up to us we’d have been together all of the time. And it sucked for my mom, because being a single parent is never easy, especially with a little prankster like me. There were times when my mind went to “What if such and such?” or “It could have been like da-da-da.”
But, as of right now, my life is working out pretty sweet and every morning I wake up grateful for the blessings that I have.
“I admire her so much for how she got her life together and made a life for me”
Two of those blessings are my new baby brother, Jaxon, and my little sister, Jazmyn, who are my dad’s children and are the cutest kids in the world. I would do anything for them.
Now I’m on the road, I won’t be around as much as I wish I could be while they’re growing up, but they’ll always know I’m their big brother and I love them. I wouldn’t trade them for all the what-ifs and could-have-beens in the world.
My mom has been up front and honest with me about the choices she made when she was my age, some of which were not the best and made life difficult for her and her family. Before I was born, she started going to church, and that became super-important to her. She could see the kind of person and the kind of Mom she wanted to be.
After she had me, she had to work really hard all the time, but she never complained. She let me be myself, but she kept an eagle eye on me, stayed strong about discipline, and impressed on me the importance of doing the right thing and keeping God in my life. I admire her so much for how she learned from her mistakes, got her life together, and made a life for me.
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
I was two years old in 1996 when The Cardigans had their monster hit “Lovefool,” the lead single from their First Band on the Moon album. It was featured in this crazy film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which is also dope. Any guy can relate to Romeo, who’s trying really hard to be cool in front of his crew, but he can’t stop looking at all these beautiful girls all over Verona, and then he falls victim to one of the killer crushes of all time.
My friends say I’m a fool to think that you’re the one for me.
I guess I’m just a sucker for love...
That’s me. Total sucker for love. That’s not a bad thing. What kind of jerk doesn’t want love? I bet 95% of sixteen-year-old guys would admit to thinking forty-five girl-related thoughts every three minutes. (The other 5% would be lying.) Everybody wants love, and there’s something about that Romeo and Juliet theme – the star-crossed lovers who can’t be together because of what other people have to say about it.
“It’s universal,” says Dan Kanter (my lead guitarist, musical director – and possibly nicest guy in the world). “It strikes a chord.”
Dan looks like a young version of Paul Simon and plays like – like – well, he plays like Dan Kanter. I can’t even think of anything to compare it to. Except maybe a mix of Fergie and Jesus. He has a bachelor’s degree in classical composition and analysis and is currently getting his master’s degree in musicology.
“Not a performance degree,” he specifies. “Music in society. I try not to think about theory when I’m on stage, but classical music taught me that art history was very linear, and now it’s fragmented, and I really enjoy that.”
Okaaaaaay??? I’m not really sure what he’s talking about but obviously Dan is pretty smart. I guess what he might be trying to say is music is part of all of our lives, that it’s like a timeline. Looking back, I see this trail of music, a million great songs that came out of the radio and passed through my head over the years, and every once in a while one of them pops up in something I’m doing now, because it’s all part of me.
Tom really took our vision on and designed a crazy cool opening for the touring show, and I don’t want to give any of the surprises away, but I get to sort of emerge from the fog and slam into “Love Me.” The show’s