Mica

I do Eric Arcenaux's vocal warm-up exercise, which has made available as a series of youtube videos. He says that you wouldn't want to just workout when getting your swimming trunks on, so, similarly, you wouldn't just warm-up before doing a gig. He stressed the importance of vocalizing every day, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Oh, and I almost forgot! Depeche mode rocks!

Jim Morrison was my first and still is my primary inspiration. He understood that music and performance is a portal to the infinite, to "the other side", and its roots are enmeshed with the gnarled spiralings of shamanism, archaic ritual, and ancient mythology. He showed that there are no limits to how far you can push the borders of reality. I think every good performer knows this instinctively, like a kind of body-knowing. I love "black" gospel. When I was young, my dad took me to a baptist church in Compton, to record the gospel music that was played there. If you've ever seen the Blues Brothers, there's that scene where James Brown plays a preacher. Man! It was just like that! So much different than a whitey church. LOL! And then that high-powered old-fashioned rock and roll, like Little Richard, and Paul McCartney singing Twist and Shout. I would love to sing like that without annihilating my throat. And then LOTS and LOTS more: from Portishead to Tom Waits to electronic music like trance and house to T-Rex to Dead Can Dance, etc etc etc etc