My Biggest Influences

Leonardo da Vinci- Leonardo is, without serious rivals, the most talented and most intelligent person to ever live. The very fact that he is one of the seminal painters of all time is just one thing to admire about him. He was the first person to thoroughly map the human body, and is a very important botanist. He was also a musician, astronomer, defense engineer, and civil engineer as well. He invented the robot, he built one for one of his patrons. Also, he revolutionized the design of firearms. The plane, helicopter, submarine, scuba devices, hang gliders, parachutes, the tank, the double-hull ship design, plate tectonics, solar energy, optics, and hydrodynamics can all be traced to him; and is the creator of the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man. The Mona Lisa is considered one of the supreme masterpieces of all time, he worked on it for over a decade and never finished it. The Last Supper is a very complex painting depicting the very moment when Christ proclaims, "One among you will betray me." He is unparalleled in his genius, he has no universal rival.

Jack Kerouac- Kerouac is the author of the one of the most influential, famous, and well-known novel in recent memory: On The Road. One of TIME magazine's 100 Greatest Novels, it tells the autobiographical story of Kerouac and his friends in the underground on post-war America, which include the amazing poet Allen Ginsburg and Neal Cassady. On The Road, written in under three weeks, under the influence of benzadrine, on one sheet of paper, is one of Kerouac's novel idiosyncracies.

J. R. R. Tolkien- Tolkien is the author and creator of Middle-earth, the most in-depth and realistic world besides our own. His novel The Hobbit and his romance The Lord of the Rings are the two most popular pieces of fantasy of all-time, with both stories selling over 100 million copies worldwide. Tolkien is the only person to have two books that have sold that much. The reason of the success of this world is the realism behind it, which is from the linguistic basis of it. Tolkien invented the two Elvish tongues, Quenya and Sindarin by 1920. His other realist factor was his serving in the Great War and losing three of his closest friends in it. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the mid 30s, and was a massive hit, eventually selling beyond 100 million copies. The publishing company asked for a sequel. Tolkien began writing LotR where The Hobbit began, with a party. He started and restarted the sequel many, many times over the ensuing twelve years before he finished. The Lord of the Rings also sold over 100 million copies, and became the second most read book of the century after The Bible. In 1996, Peter Jackson began work on adapting LotR into film, and what followed was the biggest film production ever. The eleven-and-a-half-hour film won in total seventeen Academy Awards and the third part of the film The Return of the King became the second highest grossing film ever, making over a billion, two hundred million dollars world-wide. The three parts became the 2nd, 5th, and 9th highest grossing films ever unadjusted for inflation. The books and films have become a pop culture phenomenon. The third film is the first film considered science fiction or fantasy to win Best Picture, it is also tied for the most number of Academy Awards won with eleven and won in ever category it was nominated in, only Titanic and Ben-hur have won so many Academy Awards.

Bob Dylan- Dylan is the mot important musical figure of the Twentieth Century. He almost single-handedly invented folk-rock and country-rock, he moved folk music away from artists covering traditional tunes to writing their own. He invented the music video, recorded what is perhaps the first rap song ever, and made it known that a singer doesn't have to have a conventionally great voice to be legendary. Dylan is an exceptional guitar, harmonica, and piano player, he has recorded songs with vocals that rival Elvis and Carusso. But, it his words that are most influential. He is the most important and most famous singer-songwriter in history. He introduced the Beatles to pot, and his song "Mr. Tambourine Man" was the first breath of psychadelic music (although it wasn't) and folk-rock as well. His album John Wesley Harding signaled the end of psychadlia, but Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All Along the Watchtower" from that album was it's finest hour. John Wesley Harding is also the first country-rock album. "Mr. Tambourine Man" comes from his album Bringing it all Back Home. One thing you notice, if you ever get a chance to listen to a few songs from every album of his, you realize that he never repeats successes. No album sounds like the one before it or after it. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his lyrics for many years, and in 2008 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his words. His song "Like a Rolling Stone" reached number two on the billboard charts and at six minutes long, it broke down the barriers that singles had to be short, and the lyrics were bitter and angry, unlike anything heard before in a single, Rolling Stone magazine named "Like a Rolling Stone" the greatest of all time in 2004. His albums The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Bringing it all Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, The Basement Tapes, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Slow Train Coming, Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, "Love and Theft," and Modern Times are considered some of the greatest albums ever. And that ain't the half of it.