00:01I want to begin by thanking the person who introduced and inducted me tonight.
00:07He thinks that this is the first time he has inducted me into something,
00:12but what he may not be taking into consideration is that through his decades of spellbinding storytelling,
00:20Steven Spielberg has unknowingly inducted me and countless others into his sacred club of expansive worldbuilding.
00:30From the time he was a kid, every time he dreamed something up, he wanted to do anything humanly possible
00:37to be able to show it to you.
00:40I watched his films pivot between different genres, action, to sci-fi, to historical epic, to drama, to comedy, romance,
00:49fantasy, to musical,
00:50and I watched him ace every single genre.
00:55And that kind of limitless creativity isn't just inspiring to burgeoning filmmakers.
01:01Because of examples like Steven's, I trusted my imagination regardless of if it was taking me somewhere new and uncharted.
01:10And every time I treated something up, I wanted to do everything humanly possible to be able to play it
01:19for you.
01:21A few months ago when the Songwriters Hall of Fame asked me about my heroes and the creatives who shaped
01:27my storytelling
01:28and who I might want to present the support to me, I said Steven's name.
01:35And about an hour later, until I asked the delight, I ended up on the phone with him and his
01:40legendarily effervescent wife, Kate Capshaw, who was here tonight.
01:47And he was telling me that yes, absolutely, he would be thrilled to be here.
01:52And I was completely blown away because, I mean, the man has a massive film called Disclosure Day that's coming
01:59out at midnight tonight.
02:06And he's still going to agree to show up and do this for me a few hours before he comes
02:11out.
02:11Wouldn't that be impossibly hard to balance?
02:13Wouldn't that be too difficult, scheduling-wise, and trying to give him an hour?
02:18At which point, Kate said something I'll never forget.
02:24She said, good and true things are easy.
02:31And if I look back at my entire 23-year career in music, the ups and downs, the industry battles,
02:40the trials and tribulations,
02:42the tears and the cheers and the dogpiling of doubt, the criticisms, both fair and unfair, the complete loss of
02:50privacy,
02:50the world's wars and the ego wars and the twists of fate, the absolute magical chaos of this path that
03:00I chose when I was too young to remember it ever being a choice at all,
03:07songwriting was the easiest thing I ever did.
03:12Not because it didn't take effort, it definitely did.
03:17Not that it wasn't frustrating at times, because it could be.
03:21And not that my songwriting didn't haunt me relentlessly until I cracked the perfect internal rhyme scheme for the third
03:30line,
03:31the second verse to the point where my teachers called me out in class for not paying attention, because that
03:35definitely happened.
03:38But when I see that songwriting was the easiest part for me,
03:44I think what I mean is that it wasn't stationary.
03:49No one taught me how to do it.
03:52I had to be taught how to entertain the crowd, and learn choreography, and be less annoying, and navigate the
04:02industry, and fiercely protect me on sanity.
04:05I had to learn all of that over time, through difficult lessons, and massive amounts of trial and anger, and
04:11chaos, and calamity.
04:13But songwriting for me was pretty much the only thing I ever just naturally did.
04:20My parents tell me stories about driving home from taking me to my school.
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