I'm a good Jewish boy from Edison, New Jersey, so I went and saw 'Fiddler on the Roof' because you have to: that's part of your bar mitzvah experience.
When I was growing up, I had more comedy albums than musical ones. George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor - those were my main men.
The wild thing is that when I'm in the band, I can control my destiny with four other guys. As a composer sitting in the audience, you can throw good vibes at everybody, but you can't control anybody's destiny, so it's really unsettling.
When I'm writing Broadway, it's for a character, a man, a woman, an old guy, a kid. In the band, you're talking in your own voice in the lyrics, saying what you think or feel. On Broadway, you're expressing that through a character.
I went to Temple Emanu-El, and my rabbi, Rabbi Landsberg, was a huge influence on me. When I was 7 and went to kindergarten, there he was, a young rabbi who didn't wear a yarmulke and rode a motorcycle.
In rock n' roll, there are notes that aren't like notes. They're something in between, and it's the way you scoop into it.
I think, bad times, I sit down and I play - there's definitely certain songs that touch in certain ways. I go back to 'Moonlight Sonata' by Beethoven; that usually takes care of everything.
