There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.

There are no large-scale original musicals being made right now. They're all Broadway adaptations and jukebox musicals or catalog musicals, and they just don't interest me as much.

Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.

I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much.