One day when I was like 9 I heard the Beatles on the radio and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order and I listened to them - and only them - until I was probably in high school.

I didn't really hear any other music other than what my dad was working on until I was 12. My recollection of hearing other music was that I liked some things that I heard but I always thought 'Where's the rest of it?' It didn't have the same amount of detail or instrumentation or imagination in the arrangements.

My first memory of the Rolling Stones is listening to 'Satisfaction' at a sixth-grade slumber party at a friend's house in Ankara Turkey where my family was living at the time. In the middle of our sleepover my friend's dad stopped the record when he heard the words 'girlie action!'

I didn't want to travel. I didn't want to leave my family. I heard all these stories from Dad about not having Edward around when he was young and I didn't want that to happen.

I think I had kind of an advantage. When I was growing up my dad had just got out of jail and he had a great record collection. He had - it was all - these were the songs. So I heard a lot of these songs like my whole life so for me it was easy. I already knew what I was going to sing.

My senior year of high school when I was getting recruited for college my dad goes to me 'You can become an Olympic champion.' And that's the first time that I'd heard someone else say that to me. I was like 'Uh are you talking to me?'

I've never heard my dad say a bad word about anybody. He always keeps his emotions in check and is a true gentleman. I was taught that losing it was indulgent a selfish act.

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law?

I'm a big techno fan. I love that thumping kick drum. We heard a version of 'Lost in Love' and it was thrash metal. It sounded cool!

I like that band Get Hustle. They're cool live. I haven't heard their records though.

'Sparkle' fell into my lap. I had heard a little bit about it that it was being redone in early 2011. I was just kind of like 'Oh that would be really cool ' and not really thinking too much about it and then it came through my agency. I read it I fell in love with the script and I went in to audition.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says 'What kind of music do you make?' and you say 'Pop music.' You may as well have 'I'm not cool' stamped on your forehead.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Today comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.

I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.

Have you heard about the Irishman who reversed into a car boot sale and sold the engine?