My guitar playing was born from playing in my teenage heavy rock bands.

While I was writing the songs for 'Fuzz Universe,' I was immersing myself in Bulgarian Female Choir music, Baroque lute and violin pieces, Johnny Cash songs about trains, cows, mules, and mining coal, the Bee Gees, and Ronnie James Dio.

It's so easy to practice out of context. For example, if you're learning a scale, you take that scale and you sit in your room and you go up and down the fretboard, over and over. You've gotta do that, because you need to get that scale working. But you have to keep in mind that that's not the finished product. That's the starting point.

After 35 years of bone-crushing rock guitar playing, I'm finally starting to get my head out of the harmonic sand and learning how to play over chord changes.

I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.

When you're in theater or the circus or film - to me it's all one - affairs happen. People fall in love.

Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen.

A learning experience is the best way to sum up my first film credit. It's hard to break into the film industry, and it was a minor role but still my only shot at the movies while I was doing theater.