Darren Criss (Blaine) is on Billboard Magazine's Cover + Interview!

Here is a snippet of the interview, for full interview, click here.

How did you first get into musical theater?

For me, it was Disney. I remember seeing people's reaction to "Aladdin" and thinking, "Oh, man, I want to be a genie when I grow up!" Robin Williams is a pretty big character in San Francisco. I was like, "I want to do whatever that guy does. What does he do, Mom? He's an actor? OK, I want to do that." I was all over the map, musically. I had all the "Les [Miserables]" and Andrew Lloyd Webber records, and I was a kid growing up in the '90s, so [I listened to] whatever pop was out at the time.

Your character, Blaine, was singing so much at one point this season, the show itself even joked about it in a recent episode.

They kind of called it out, which I'm glad they did. Blaine definitely had his moment in the sun. I think it's time to focus back on the characters that fans of the show really know and love. Completely objectively from watching the show, I was like, "Why does Blaine get all these songs? This is ridiculous. I want to hear other people doing stuff." I think we're focusing a little more back on New Directions and taking a little bit of a break from the Warblers.

Do you have any creative input on the songs you get to perform on "Glee"?

I'm still the new guy, so I don't want to go around saying, "We should do this. We should do that." But Ryan is always open to ideas, and I did at one point say, "Hey, Neon Trees' 'Animal' is a really great song." And about a week later it showed up in the script. So whether or not he did it because of me, or if that was an idea he'd already had, I don't know, but it was a suggestion that I made and it became a reality. It just goes to show how open and receptive he is to ideas.