I show rock and rollers how to grow old gracefully.

If you don't have God in your life, you have to fill up on something. And you usually reach for the four great substitutes, the classical addictions: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. So you try to fill yourself up.

With Del Shannon - and I've got to tell you this - there's nobody probably on the face of the earth that I identified more with musically. We used to sit and sing George Jones and Hank Williams tunes.

If you make excuses, you're going to believe in a lie. And I don't believe in that lie that you can't make it, that somebody is trying to hold you back.

I was raised in restaurants. My parents opened their first restaurant, Buonavia, in Queens when I was just 3. This business has always been my way of life. As a kid, home was reserved only for sleeping. After school, you could find my sister and I helping out at the family restaurant.

You really have to stay true to yourself, as cheesy as that sounds. And you cannot take no for an answer, and you have to dream big. I think that's the greatest thing my family ever taught me: if you're going to dream, you have to dream so big.

I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just... interested.

I moved out when I was 17 to get away from a pretty tough and difficult family environment.