We’re a family.
We all have Christmas dinner, and I’m telling you, my grandma puts up an awesome Christmas dinner. Turkey and gravy. I wish I could have a trough of that stuff on my bus after the show. (We all work up an appetite during a performance.) It’s the best. We all eat until we’re about to roll over. Then we play this gift-exchange game with dice. Everybody shows up with a gift. If you’re a girl, bring a gift for a girl; if you’re a guy, bring a gift for a guy. That way there’s the right number of each. You take turns rolling the dice, and, if you roll doubles, you grab a gift. If you roll doubles again, you get to grab somebody else’s gift. There’s always a lot of horsing around and teasing, but nobody actually gets mad because you don’t know what’s in the package anyway, so why would you care if your gift gets stolen? You get another turn, and the game keeps going until everybody has a gift. Then we all open our gifts and end up trading anyway.
That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have. If this particular gift isn’t what you need, maybe that gift over there works for you, and, meanwhile, the first gift is exactly what somebody else needs. You can’t always get what you want. But, if you’re lucky, you get what you need. And I was lucky. Along with a lot of other blessings, I got my family – just the way they are. And now my extended family extends even wider to include Scooter, Carin, Kenny, Ryan and Dan and a lot of other people I’ll tell you about a little later in this book.
“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 opening makes me sound like a bad-ass.
/> “I get to sort of emerge from the fog and slam into ‘Love Me.’ The show’s opening makes me sound like a bad-ass.”
BEAT IT
Back in 1996, Mom says I was all about the beat. And I suppose that makes sense. Before anything else, you gotta have rhythm. She loved pop music and played the radio loud when we were in the car. At home, she’d crank her stereo listening to Boyz II Men or Michael Jackson. I’d wail on whatever was handy – pots and pans, plastic bowls, tables and chairs – with whatever else was handy. Like a spoon or the phone or my fists. She got me a little toy drum kit, probably to keep me from destroying the place, and I hammered on that until people started noticing I was actually laying down a pretty sick beat.
My mom is an absolute sweetheart who has this vivacious, goofy personality, so there were always a lot of interesting, artsy people hanging around our place. I think artsy people who can’t afford to go anywhere tend to hang out in the living room of the coolest person, playing guitars and talking about philosophy or whatever, and that’s the living room I grew up in. (I guess I just also realized that with my mom being single, a lot of those guys were probably hitting on her, but again: freakout factor. Not gonna go there.)
At the church my mom went to, there was a lot of music during worship, and most of it was backed by a contemporary praise band. The people in the band were friends, and, while we were hanging out with them, sometimes the percussionist would let me play with the various noisemakers. When he saw that I wanted to play – not just play – he’d let me sit on his knee while he played on the drum kit, and, after a while, he handed me the sticks and let me have a go at it.
By the time I was four or five, I could climb up on the stool and play the kit all by myself, and, about that same time, I discovered I could get up on the piano bench and pound on that, too.
Much to everyone’s surprise, it started sounding like actual music.
So here might be a good place to stop and say that if there’s an annoying little kid in your life – a little brother or some kid you babysit for – who wants to make noise and pretend to play music, I hope you’ll put up with him. Because, at some point, he won’t be playing anymore. He’ll be playing. Kids have to be allowed to do things they’re no good at. How else are they supposed to learn?
And, while you’re at it, you have to let yourself do stuff you’re not good at. Don’t get hung up on what other people think about what you’re doing. Dare to be a sucky skateboarder or a lousy video editor or a completely crappy golfer. If we do only the stuff we’re good at, we never learn anything new. Think of all the great possibilities in life that pass by because we’re too chicken to explore them and risk looking like a loser. Screw the haters who have nothing better to do than make fun of people who are brave enough to put themselves out there. Get out of your comfort zone and go for it. You never know unless you try.
‘Nuff said. Back to when I was five.
“You have to let yourself do stuff you’re not good at”
I was actually getting to be pretty good on the drums, and not too heinous on the piano. Mom and one of her musician friends Nathan McKay, who my grandparents called “the Lion King” because of his big, bushy beard, decided that I needed a real drum set of my very own. Nathan, aka “the Lion King,” and a bunch of his friends pulled together a little benefit event at a local bar, where they played music and collected donations to buy me my first real trap set with a kick drum, floor toms, snare, hi-hat and boom cymbal. I went crazy on it. Now Mom had to crank the stereo loud enough for me to play along.
Some of the church band people were playing at the fair that summer, and they invited me to play drums with them, but I was so little that the emcee couldn’t see me sitting there ready to play. He was like, “Well, I see you guys brought a drum set, but where’s the drummer?” I gave him a little tasty lick – ba-dum-bum-chhh! – and he stretched to see me back there behind the cymbal boom. Then he goes to the audience, “You won’t believe this. No way! There’s a little guy back there with his hat on backwards.”
I kept playing and getting better over the next couple of years. It got to be 2000, 2001, and you know what that means.
Beyoncé.
Destiny’s Child blew up out of Houston and killed everybody with “Survivor” and “Bootylicious.” That same year, I heard Alicia Keys’ “Fallin’,” and I still can’t get enough of that song. Usher murdered “U Remind Me.” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot did that crazy cool video for “Get Ur Freak On,” and there was that insane remake of “Lady Marmalade” by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya and Pink. Plus, we heard from Outkast, Nelly, Uncle Kracker, Mary J. Blige – all in all, it was a very good year for music.
FEELING THE MUSIC
When I was six, I started first grade at Jeanne Sauvé Catholic School in Stratford, but after school I was banging on those drums and getting my musical education on the radio. I was also figuring things out on the piano. I couldn’t read music (I was just beginning to read books), and Mom couldn’t afford lessons for me, but I knew what I wanted the music to sound like. I could feel it when the chords and melody didn’t fit together, the same way you can feel it when your shoes are on the wrong feet. I just kept poking and experimenting until it fit the way I wanted it to. When I listened to music in church, I could feel those harmonies hanging in the air like humidity. It wasn’t an issue of learning it exactly: it was more as if the music soaked in through my skin. I don’t know how else to explain it.
As soon as I was big enough to get my arms around a guitar, I started figuring that out, too. You have to build up strength in your hands, and, until you build calluses on your fingertips, it feels like razor blades. That probably discourages a lot of people. They start out thinking, “Hey, playing guitar would be fun. And it looks pretty easy.” After thirty minutes or so, they’re like, “Ow! This really hurts.” And they forget about how much fun it was supposed to be and give up.
The thing is, if you keep on it, you get used to it pretty fast, and then you just keep plugging away at it while you’re watching TV or waiting for supper. Or sitting in your room because you’re grounded for mouthing off. But we don’t need to go into that. The point is, I played guitar because it was fun, and, by the time I was eight or nine, I was all right.
“Mom couldn’t afford lessons for me, but I knew what I wanted the music to sound like... it soaked in through my skin”
The best times were when my dad was one of the people hanging out playing guitar in our living room. He wasn’t a big fan of pop music. He was more into classic rock and heavy metal. He taught me some stuff like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and a few other Dylan songs, turned me onto Aerosmith, Metallica, and Guns N’ Roses, which got me listening to (and showing respect for) the legends like Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. My dad taught me how to play “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, and I still remember it. (You should hear Dan Kanter and me kill that thing.)
To play metal or even the 1980s hair band stuff like Journey and Twisted Sister, you’ve gotta know the so-called power chords, and Dad taught me a few tricks there, too. He showed me how to play barré chords, which is when you lay your index finger flat across all the strings at once, which moves the chords up a little on the neck of the guitar. You’re essentially playing the same chords, but changing the key, so you can play the song in whatever range fits your voice. If you know the basic form of five or six barré chords, you can play pretty much any song in the universe. Grab the lyrics off the Web, listen to the changes and progressions five or six times, and there you go. You’re Green Day. In your room, that is.
ROCKIN’ ROBIN
I was Metallica and Matchbox 20 in my room at night, but at school by day I was just me. Nobody at school knew anything about this part of my life. I was a hockey kid like all my friends, and I liked it that way. I was already a little odd because Jeanne Sauvé Catholic School was a French immersion school. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You’re immersed in French. T
hey don’t speak English at all. The idea is that you learn to speak French while you’re learning to add and subtract and all the other things you’d be learning at a regular school.
I had a lot of friends at my French school, but, when I was seven or eight, I started playing house league hockey with a bunch of guys who went to regular English-speaking public school. I didn’t need them to think I was a music geek in addition to being a French geek. (Of course, now I’m really glad that I speak French, because, let’s face it, girls dig it when a guy speaks French. They call it the language of love, and that ain’t no coincidence. Plus, I love my French fans! Très jolie!)
My best friends – from that day to this – were my hockey mates, especially Chaz Somers and Ryan Butler, and, man, did we have fun back then!
We weren’t bad kids at all, but we were kinda out of control at times. We’d go down in the basement at Grandpa and Grandma’s house to watch TV and end up playing kickball with the couch pillows or battling a soccer ball back and forth or practically strangling each other with professional wrestling moves. We never destroyed anything major, but there were a few small casualties. A couple of lamps were sacrificed. And, among Grandpa’s hunting trophies, there’s a stuffed fox that mysteriously ended up missing a leg.
“You guys know anything about this?” he asked.
We all looked at him as innocent as could be. “No. No, sir. That wasn’t us.”