Tierney SUTTON (Jazz Hot 637)

One of the things which makes jazz singer Tierney Sutton so remarkable, and sets her apart from many peers, is the mere fact that she suits her job: she’s a genuine jazz singer, quite obviously in love with the Great American Songbook. Others on the “jazz vocal” scene have turned down various pop roads, but Sutton stays her course, and the ripples of appreciation are expanding, year by year, album by album.
Though the 42-year-old Sutton’s recording career began only in 1998, with her debut Introducing Tierney Sutton, on the Dutch Challenge label, she’s in mid-career now, with an impressive and diverse body of albums on the Telarc label. While other popular jazz singers in the 21st century have leaned into pop directions, Sutton has been recording music of instrumental heroes (Unsung Heroes), Bill Evans material (Blue in Green), and a beautifully moody journey into the Frank Sinatra songbook (Dancing in the Dark).
A new live album, I’m With the Band, shows her at the height of her game. Among other virtues, Sutton has a sure and supple way with tone and phrasing, a taste for inventive arrangements which both respect and stretch the originals, and a manner of scatting which gives new life to an oft-abused art form.
Another musical in her favor is suggested by the new album’s title- she is “with the band,” integrated with as opposed to a singer floating on top of the band. Last spring, she and her longstanding band mates Christian Jacob on piano, Ray Brinker on drums, and both Trey Henry and Kevin Axt on bass- Sutton’s steady band for 12 years so far- settled in for a stint at the Oak Room, in Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel. After honing a set of material there, and road-testing it with live audiences, they moved over to Birdland for two days to record live. In those Birdland sessions, she was with the band, and the live audiences were definitely with the singer.
Ironically, Sutton has had the pleasure of these musicians company for so long primarily because they, like her, live not in New York City, but out west in Los Angeles, California, where the players generally make their living by playing in studios. Sutton’s husband, Alan Kaplan, is a trombonist who also works in the studios, and occasionally crosses paths with Sutton’s musical life.
Back home in Southern California, the charming, self-effacing and self-reflective Sutton sat down for a long lunch interview.

Interview by Josef Woodard


Jazz Hot : You do some intriguing and maybe brave things with the standard jazz repertoire. With your arrangements, you often mess around with the basic structure of the song, while somehow respecting it at the same time.
Tierney Sutton : Well, we hope so.

Is that your agenda, in a way?
Yeah, I think that’s our main thing. Christian says “we have to serve the soul of the song.’ I was thinking of that today, listening to the record after not listening to it in awhile. I realized that, when it goes right, it’s great. Any arrangement you hear has gone through permutations and arm-wrestling and debates. We’ll be touring and doing something, and come down to the breakfast table the next morning, and one of us will say “you know, last night, I was thinking about the second part of the bridge of blahblahblah… it’s bothering me, because…’ And Christian will say “you know, the same spot bothers me.’ And it’s almost always the same spot that bothers us.
There is always this very conscious thing in everybody’s head, as we do this. We might say `that just seems stupid… that’s just too much.’ Or someone will say `when it goes there, it reminds of that record from 1988, and I hate that record.’
We can’t do that. It’s too x or y. We want to keep it original. Then there’s always the weird thing of trying to make sure that everything suits the lyric. When it really goes right, something happens that’s really interesting. It definitely happened on “Face the Music and Dance.” Things get sunken into and the guys may or may not be aware of it. But what happens is that the lyric itself is literally reflected by the music. For example, the word “romance” has a specific chord change, spirit change, and everything. When it goes right, it’s almost like everyone is singing these lyrics, and serving them. It works with the melodic line.
When you’re working with a really well-crafted song to begin with, those things are more likely to happen, because there is a great architecture that you’re dealing with, that’s solid and beautiful. Then you have a light-upon-light situation, when everybody’s sensibility has gone into it and everybody’s concentrating on it. I’ll listen back and notice that, although English is Christian’s second language, the way he’s responding is that he’s telegraphing what I’m thinking, lyrically, in that moment.

So it’s a very collaborative creative process with this band?
Absolutely. Each person is as important as every other person. It’s really unusual in that regard. I don’t really think there’s anything else like it in jazz today. There is (pianist) Lawrence Hobgood and Kurt Elling, who do stuff together. But with us, it’s really all four of us, every single person. They are the first, when something’s bothering someone, to say `you know what? What if we did this or this?’ We slave over every little detail, like exactly what the tempo should be. `Are we just playing that too fast? Is that dragging a little bit when we go into double time there? What should we think about when we count it off? Which part is the climax?’
It’s extraordinary to have five people weighing in on these things, people who are at such a high level at what they do. They play all sorts of different music all the time and are not interested in re-inventing the wheel, in any way. They’re so not about making another record that sounds like other records. As soon as we start going down that path, the brakes are put on.

Sometimes, there are just small quirky details in your arrangements that make the difference. On the live album’s version of “Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” you stretch out the title lyric, syncopating it.
Yeah, I’ll tell you what happened with that. That’s a great example. We started doing that the first week we were at the Oak Room. I wanted to do a Harold Arlen song, and something at a loping tempo (snaps her fingers). We didn’t have anything in the medium tempo. We wanted something that serves the set the same way “Route 66” does, that fits in that place.
At a sound check, Kevin started playing that bass riff (sings it). I thought `oh, that’s great.’ Christian started to go over the chords. He couldn’t just play the regular chords. Also, on the second A section, a beat is missing. Ray is so unbelievably and all that stuff is done so smoothly. He did a metric modulation and it becomes so integral in the way he plays, and everybody starts listening to him.
That’s just to make it ours, to make it a little weird. But if it sounded weird, we wouldn’t do it. Immediately, when we thought of doing that, it felt right and like that’s what we should do.

What is happening there?
I don’t know, exactly. I’ll have to ask Ray. I can figure it out, but I don’t usually bother to. But I should.
I get a lot of e-mails from people saying `I’d like permission to use your arrangements.’ You can’t really copyright an arrangement- you can, but it’s a big mess. One of the things we’ll probably do this year is to make a book of our arrangements. We’ve got about a hundred of them by now. We can use it as an educational book. We’ll have the parts all written out and we can go into schools. It would be the same way they do it with big bands. All those things will be written out.
We wrote out a chart of our arrangement for “Autumn Leaves,” and there were five different endings and little `go back to here’ and signs and codas and second codas. But if it comes out sounding that complicated, that’s not good. That’s our thing: it should be complicated an interesting to musicians, but be so at home that Joe person can just listen to it and say `oh, that’s kind of cool.’ But you shouldn’t have to follow the bouncing ball, but know that something is happening. I’m sort of like that sometimes. They’ll say `you’re fine until we tell you you’re singing in 7/4.’

2005 has been a real New York year for you. You had your Carnegie Hall debut early in the year, did a month at the Oak Room and the Birdland recording. You were warming up for that live session?
Yes, or getting burnt out before the recording, depending how you look at it. I’d say a little of both.

You grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and studied music in Boston. After that, were you tempted to land in New York rather than to Los Angeles?
I was living in Boston and knew I had to move to either New York or L.A. I had a handful of musician friends living in L.A. inviting me to come out and check out the scene. When I came out, I saw Jack Sheldon’s big band. Ray, Trey and Christian were the rhythm section for that band. I said `that’s who I want to play with.’ I knew that they were extraordinary, and for me, it was a sign that there were extraordinary young jazz musicians who live in L.A., which of course, is not the L.A. reputation, but that’s a lie.
Of course, I go to New York, hear bands and think `wow, these guys are great players.’ But I think there’s a greater emphasis on having a strong individual voice in New York. I think all the guys in my band have a very strong individual voice, but their aesthetic is one of unity and wanting to hear the gestalt of what’s happening, and they have a ton of practice at that, paying in all different kinds of styles and situations.

There also the factor of L.A. studio players with a burning desire to get out and play something more expressive and creative. They must, conversely, appreciate the opportunity your band affords them to do that.
Yes. It’s a two-way street. I sensed that early on. When I first moved to L.A., I would do my chump change $50 jazz gig on a Thursday night in some restaurant. I would call all these players that I knew and say `come sit in. I’d love to have you.’ They would come in droves, these great players, just to get a chance to play, and knowing I would have a great rhythm section and had great songs. They also knew that I would let them pick the songs, because I knew enough songs to be able to do that. I was interested in allowing them their space.
That’s kind of the secret of us staying together for this long. We all have a sense of wanting everyone to have their space and be happy. It’s not `well, now I’m the soloist. I will be the star for awhile.’ Especially at this point, it’s a matter of creating a band sound and knowing what that is, and knowing what it is when we’re all together.
On those rare occasions now where we have to have a sub, it’s tremendously difficult. We make jokes about it. It’s like losing a body part or something. We’ll be sitting paying and a spleen pops out.

The tradition of the live album is sometimes an opportunity for an artist to coast a bit. But I don’t get the sense of any coasting going on with this project. Have you ever coasted?
Nah. The boys don’t let me coast. There’s no coasting, for anybody. That’s one of the things I find extremely sustaining and joyful about having this project. The guys always say it’s the favorite project they do, and also the most difficult. They have to concentrate harder to play this music than anything they do. That combination of things is wonderful. In terms of the tradition of jazz music, I think that’s what everybody wants: something that nourishes them and gives them a challenge.
If you don’t create it to be challenging, they’ll get bored fast. Guys at this level get bored fast. We all do. So, no: no coasting will be done.
It’s a double-edged sword. So many of the things I do vocally in the arrangements are really exposed and hard, and there have been nights. Last year, we did 100 shows. There were nights when I was so tired and I would think `why do I have to set up everything to be so hard for me? Why can’t I just eff-ing do the little one-six-two-five and I’ll come in. Why do I do this to myself? I’m tired today.’

Is that work ethic something in your genes, in your background?
I think of myself, in many ways, of being a very lazy person. I can be very lazy.
But I do have a strong work ethic. All the guys in my band have that same feeling. Starting with a guy like Christian Jacob, he has been a virtuoso since he was five. To play with players at such a high level, I’m not nearly the musician that they are, but I feel it is my responsibility to try and aim as high as possible, because that’s what I’ve got. That’s my band.
Part of it is my feeling about what jazz is and what it should be. When I listen to Ella in Rome, it’s so clear that you’re listening to something you couldn’t wake up tomorrow and do because you feel like it. Not that it isn’t joyful and can’t follow along and say `wow, this is wonderful.’ But if you want to sing along with Ella, it takes some work.
That was always my sense about what jazz was, as opposed to what a lot of pop music was. It wasn’t this immediately accessible thing that anyone could do. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be inaccessible to people. You don’t want to be virtuosic for the sake of it. That balance is the thing we really try to strike.
I think I got really lucky in terms of keeping the band together. I was giving a talk on this last week. It was easy for me to be a humble leader, because I knew they were better musicians than I was. I didn’t have to pretend nothing. I just went `wow, you guys are scaring me.’ It was very easy for me to really listen to them, because I had to with people at that level. It would be stupid for me to put on some air about that. That was a big advantage, my knowing that and not worrying about it that much- I just thought `well, I’m just going to try to keep up as best I can with these guys.’ That demands that I put myself out there.

You’ve also done studio work as a singer. Do you still pursue that, on the side of your jazz life?
Yeah, now and then. I just saw a commercial that I did last summer, which ran quite a bit, on TV again. It’s one where nobody could recognize me singing. They wanted me to use a ‘20s, Betty Boop-y kind of voice, so that’s what it was. They sent me a little mp3 of the original recording of this thing. It’s for Yoplait. I’m singing this weird little song. Usually, when I have anything on--which is not that often, maybe once a year—some guy in the band or students of mine would come up and say `is that you on the J.C. Penny commercial? I knew it.’ With this one, nary a soul caught it, nobody.

So you do have the ability to step outside of yourself and mimic other voices?
Yeah, I like to do that. In fact, I had a different voice years ago for a cartoon. A good friend of mine was doing the music for it and he asked if I could do Shirley Bassey. So I did a Goldfinger kind of voice.
The way it works in movies and TV now is that everything is so concentrated and specialized that I could do all sorts of different things if I got called to do it. But I only usually get called as someone specializing in jazz. They might have an Ella Fitzgerald cut that they want to do a la Ella. They don’t to pay for her and they don’t want it to sound too much like her so they get sued. It’s a fine line they have to walk. That’s the kind of stuff that I get calls to do. It’s a once in a while thing, but it’s so lucrative that if you get it, it’s great.
It’s lucrative compared to the amount of time it takes to do it. You go in and you’re done in fifteen minutes, and it turns into thousands of dollars very quickly.

That is a funny and tricky distinction, having to sound close to a certain singer, but not too close. Is that literally how it works when you’re working on the session, that someone is keeping tabs on the proximity to the desired sound?
Well, yeah. I don’t think anybody’s ever sounded like Ella, so I don’t think there’s any fear of that happening. That’s a testament to her greatness. I can kind of sound like Sarah Vaughan, if I need to, or Nancy Wilson or other people--who I love and admire. But no one has ever sounded like Ella, which is really something to say. I don’t think they’re that conscious. They have to be, to a certain degree.
The first two I’ve done like that were Ella jobs. Then I got one that was Chris Connor, although the people at the jingle house had no idea who it was singing. This one ran—it was called “Flying High.” It was really beautifully sung. It sounded so good. They brought me in and played this track they were using as a provisional track. They put it on and I said `whoever this is, is great. Who is this?’ They said `I don’t know.’ All these people who do this are about 28. I’m sitting there and I said `is this Chris Connor?’ `Yeah, I think that’s it.’

When did you know that being a jazz singer would be your path? Was this something dating from childhood?
I was in college. I sang, but I didn’t really know anything about jazz. I had a summer job as a singing cocktail waitress. I was a “Heidel Honey,” as in the Heidel House resort in Green Lake, Wisconsin. I was singing with organ, drums and accordion.

Polkas, perhaps?
Well, it should have been, by all rights, but no.

I’d love to find taped evidence of that. Is there any?
No. There are photos, but no tape. Yes, I’d love to hear it. I never even thought of that, but that would be hysterical.
We played pop songs and Broadway tunes, like “Georgia on My Mind,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “Moonlight in Vermont,” and they were really good songs. I didn’t have one version stuck in my head, so I wasn’t channeling Mariah Carey’s lick. The songs were strong and the melodies were pretty. It got me thinking `hmm, what are these songs.’
Then, across the street, a real jazz trio was playing. It was led by a singer-pianist, the Mary Jay Trio. Her son and daughter played bass and drums. It was acoustic, swinging jazz. I would go over there and listen to that. That was the summer I discovered what jazz was.
Later, I was at Wesleyan University, and there was a jazz pianists on campus, who had actually graduated. He needed singer and put up signs. Ah, the good old days, when a jazz pianist would put up signs looking for a singer. I remember the sign said `vocalist needed, to sing standards and bebop tunes.’ I had no idea what a bebop tune was. I knew what standards were.
I called him up and said `I know three standards,’ which I did. He heard me sing and said `well, let’s get you a Real Book.’ We drove somewhere in Connecticut, forty miles away, and got one from under a counter somewhere. What was kind of cool was that these songs were halfway in my ears. I kind of knew them. He’d teach me the bridges. This is kind of a weird joke, but the very first song that I learned was “Lush Life.”

A nice way to start…
Yeah. He said `you’ve got to learn this song.’ I said `ok.’ I really learned it. I learned the melody as written. Nobody sings it as written, not even Ella. But I’d never heard anybody sing it, so I wasn’t learning it from somebody’s version. I was learning it from a pianist. That’s how it began.
I remember learning “Sophisticated Lady,” walking through campus. That’s kind of what made me think of jazz as this thing that was essentially this virtuosic music. The melody lines and the way they work are something you have to learn. I suppose if you’re around it and have that in your ears from the time you’re a little kid, it comes more naturally. I’ve worked with a lot of singers with great voices, who have sung tons of pop music, and they can’t sing a half step. Give them “Prelude to a Kiss” and watch out.

There is the common idea that coming to an art form later in life can be beneficial, forging a different kind of passion. As you say, you didn’t grow up with it, so it wasn’t running through your head.
I really didn’t, although I think that jazz and the Great American songbook… I don’t know how it is today, but when I was growing up, even in the ‘70s and ‘80s, every elevator you went into or a doctor’s office, it is still around. If you have an ear and are absorbing things, they’re in your head. It was really ridiculous how many of those songs I knew already, and how easy it was to learn them.
With some of them, it wasn’t so easy. But usually, it was “oh yeah, I know `Girl from Ipanema’ and `Corcovado’ and `Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I don’t know if it’s still that way.

I think it is. The standards songbook shows up in movies and commercials and other subversive ways the music slips into the collective unconscious.
Yeah, I think you’re right.

In some sense, you’re something of a late-bloomer, aren’t you?
Getting into jazz at 19 is not being a late-bloomer. I said to a young guy who interviewed me around the time of Blue in Green. He said `well, you’ve been around a long time.’ At the time, I was 36 or something. I said `this is jazz, not gymnastics. What are you talking about, being out here a long time? This is like being a kid, compared to all my heroes.’ My age now is very young.
A friend of mine in New York said ‘a young jazz singer is a jazz singer under 50. A jazz singer in her prime is between 50 and 70, and after 70, they’re experienced.’ Really, that’s the way I always thought about it. All of my heroes did their best work after 40.

You were speaking of the way the jazz singer world is presently. What was it like when you first entered the atmosphere, so to speak?
I was considered to be child. All of my heroes and people who I hung out with were all 15 or 20 years older than I was, at least. There was a sense that it was all about music, about learning songs and being turned onto a new record or a new arrangement or something they hadn’t heard before. So I think of the kind of conversations that my students have with each other and that people ask me via e-mail now, as opposed to where my head was at.
At that time, in the early ‘90s, there had been no major big breakthrough jazz star in 20 or 30 years. Diana hadn’t broken yet. Cassandra Wilson was kind of making some noise. And that was cool. I knew who those people were. I knew about Shirley Horn. Cassandra Wilson was considered the young one, and she was considerably older than I was. And then there was Shirley Horn. I thought `this is my kind of world, man. She makes this comeback in her 60s.’
I listen to all these jazz stations. In those years, I became sort of like a jazz monk. I didn’t listen to any music besides jazz. I was still interested in learning the songs and figuring out who these people were doing this weird, underground thing that I hadn’t known about before. I remember during that period, there were two times when I pulled over and had to say `who is this?’ One of them was Shirley Horn and the other one was Cassandra Wilson.
Neither of them were humongoid stars in the public imagination, but they were very respected by jazz people and jazz musicians. I thought `this is healthy. This is nice.’ There was a sense that the older players were the most respected. It was a natural, honorable thing, the way Ray Brown was treated later in his life, for instance. I thought `yeah, I could do this. This is cool.’ I didn’t even give it much thought. I just thought about what a nice scene this is.
And then, with Diana (Krall), there was just this frenzy, because somebody figured out `well, we can make money at this if we market it in this way.’ That had nothing to do with her artistry. She always sounds great. It’s just the marketing that occurred from that. So now, I get these long e-mails from people asking me about how to get an agent and a record deal and where to get photos taken, from these 18-year-old girls. I write them back and I say `well, fall in love with your music. Do music and surround yourself with great musicians. This is all I know.’
Everything else I know has been peripheral to that process, and feels a lot healthier for me because it’s grounded in that process rather than in marketing myself, somehow. That’s someone else’s job. If you don’t have the product and the passion for the art, what’s the point. Jazz was always about that. To me, to have a focus in a different place is an unfortunate thing.

You told me that Ray Brown advised you to do more familiar songs, after your first couple of Telarc albums. Was he was trying to pull you out of your esoteric corner?
He was, and he was very smart. When we tour, the stuff on that record gets played so much. Our little musician tendencies to want to play “The Peacocks” or whatever the song is has to be balanced with “Route 66,” for people who aren’t jazzheads. They can’t sit through the Wayne Shorter concert or enjoy the things that we might love. I think that’s really important to what we do.
With the Frank Sinatra ballads record, that’s what I was listening to all the time. That was sincere. I was sitting there thinking `well, how can I balance out my discography?’ I was just listening to those Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins records all the time, and playing them for my students all the time, saying `listen to him sing this. It’s amazing.’ I had been anti-Frank during my jazz nun years. I thought he was the antithesis of cool and just `eww.’ Then I realized that he was a virtuoso.
See what I mean? It always comes back to that thing of having something that you just cannot deny. And you cannot deny, in my opinion, that Frank Sinatra’s ballad-singing is excellent.

And you did focus on the ballads on the album.
Yeah. That’s what, to me, is what made Frank excellent. That’s the thing. If I’m going to study swing singing, it’s going to be Sarah or Ella or Nancy or any number of others. Frank was a good swing singer, but he wasn’t a hugely improvisational swing singing. He didn’t take a tremendous amount of chances. He had great diction, great phrasing, great pitch, great sound. All of those things were truly excellent in him. But in terms of creating something that hadn’t been there before, that then could be taken on not as him… anybody who tries to copy that part of Frank’s singing just sounds like a parody of Frank.
But if you copy Ella’s phrasing, first, it takes you a really, really long time, and then you’re still going to really sound like her. You’re not going to sound like a poor person’s Ella. You’re just going to sound like I don’t know what. It’s a different beats entirely. But his ballad singing is just the best, to my way of hearing it. Everything about it - the diction, the pitch, the emotional content through reading of the lyric, the pacing of it, the dynamics - singing really soft and reaching a crescendo at just the right place. The breath control is impressive, too, just from a vocal standpoint.
It’s really fun when you’re dealing with people who hate him, and many people do- many people I respect hate him. But then I’ll put stuff on and say `ok, you listen to this. Listen to when he breathes and tell me this isn’t excellent.’ Eventually, they have to admit that it’s great. They’ll say `well, it just rubs me the wrong way, because I know it’s him.’

I always wondered about the rulebook of scat singing. Unlike an instrumentalist, you have to decide on the syllabic content of what comes out of your mouth in an improvisation. What syllables are cool to use, which aren’t?
I never think about that at all, except that I’m trying to be an instrument. So whatever serves the melodic vibe and makes the articulation of the notes work, that’s the syllable you should use. If that’s in your head, then the natural syllables that work with your anatomy pop out.
There’s a whole scene around that. A friend of mine in Boston, a great singer named Bob Scoloff, has a whole book with actual written-out things that people do. I would imagine it could be great. But that’s not how I do it.

I never got the sense from your scatting that you’re tapping into the clichés of the medium. You’ve never made me cringe.
You know what? With scat singing, that’s the best one could hope for. That’s pretty much what I go for - never make anybody cringe (laughs).

You have really dug yourself into the great American songbook, to the exclusion of originals and other more contemporary songs. You haven’t done a Radiohead tune yet, the de rigeur band for young jazz musicians to cover. The song choice is part of your philosophy, isn’t it?
Well, it’s really hard to find a song written after 1960 that stands up next to Jerome Kern. It’s just not easy. Well, maybe we could say after 1970. Once again, it goes back to the whole philosophy we were talking about. When that standard of melodic line is established by Duke Ellington and Henry Mancini, it’s not so easy to tolerate anything less. It’s really hard.
Of course, there are some exceptions. There are a few Lennon and McCartney songs that are pretty good, but there’s one member of the band - who shall remain nameless- who is anti-Beatles. So therefore, no Beatles material has ever made its way into our world yet.

It does seem that your career has had a nice kind of slope to it. Do you sense that?
It’s a very, very organic slope, which is very cool. That’s the other thing that I think about when I talk to young singers and friends. I talk to people now who say `it’s just not right that you didn’t blow up. It’s just not right.’ I say `every time we go somewhere, we have bigger houses than we had the last time we played there. Each record sells a little more than the last one. Isn’t that ok?’ `No, it’s not ok.’ People tell me that.
What’s happening with these people. Can’t we just grow, little by little, day by day, not all of a sudden be everywhere? When I started out, there would never have been that kind of pressure or that idea that somehow if I wasn’t on Time’s cover, I was not a success. That whole construct is unfortunate.

You’re increasingly respected in the jazz scene, but still not quite on the general American radar, the screen of popular consciousness. I assume that’s ok by you, isn’t it?
That’s right. No, I’m absolutely not on the American radar. And proud of it. No, that’s not true. That whole thing is very interesting for me, first of all because of these changes in the business that we talked about, and what my mind and heart have always told me what jazz is about.
Basically, it (has to do with) the same spiritual metaphor that there is what’s really going on, under the surface, and then there is what seems to be going on that is so compelling to us. But that’s not really the real stuff. That has always fascinated me.
I’ve always had this idea: what if people actually looked like their spiritual level, if one day people were transformed? What if the people who were really fighting the good fight in a real, real way became the most gloriously beautiful and handsome people in the world, and other people who are spiritual bankrupt suddenly became hideous little trolls?
The things that I’m interested in are seeking the deeper things and figuring out how to redefine success for yourself.