Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am always trying to write.
I can bear a lot but not that pall
You should listen to a lot of different music.
I would happy for someone to download my music.
I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.
We are blessed and sustained by what is not said
I have writing songs on my own for about six years.
I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.
There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.
I don't think I'm abnormal and I think that lets people down.
I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.
We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.
I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.
I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.
Never get so attached to a poem that you forget truth that lacks lyricism.
The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.
And a thimble's worth of milky moon Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.
I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.
I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.
I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.
What a woman does is open doors. And it is not a question of locking or unlocking.
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.
It broke my heart when I learned the moon had been passing the sun’s light off as its own.
If I ever met Dolly Parton for sure, I would just not be able to say anything. I love her.
I can't play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can't do the key changes.
The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.
People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.
I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn't play long enough to be really great.
I give away CDs at shows if someone wants a CD but doesn't have any money. I wouldn't want to do that forever.
I'm not a wanderer, which is funny because I'm on tour half the time. I'm a home, hearth and family kind of person.
There's something fundamental to the harp that has retained its appeal my whole life. It's an instrument I am just in love with.
I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight No I was all horns and thorns sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright.
I've been unaware of how people react to the instrument. People have ideas of what a harp is supposed to sound like, and a lot of them are negative ideas.
I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.
Well, yeah, I wanted to resist the urge to thicken everything up with instrumentation, because I just felt like I was interested in seeing how the songs did on their own.
People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.
Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.
I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.
In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.
And all that we built, and all that we breathed And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.
Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.
I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.
It's valid that the Strokes and the Pleased have been influenced by some of the same bands. But it's invalid in the sense that we listen to the Strokes and try to sounds like them. I think that they are a good band.
The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.
I don't look at people's expressions, because I still get nervous when I play, especially when I first put the harp up there. I just try to tune - it takes me a half-hour to tune, and I get nervous if I look at anybody when I do it.
I didn't sing for years and years, but I started playing harp when I was maybe 9 or 10. I had actually wanted to play for years leading up to that, but no teacher in our little town would take me on as a student, because I was too young.
I didn't really know a lot of the history when I was younger. I didn't realize that the harp is coded in such a specific way in musical circles. It's kind of this society instrument because of its history as a young woman's parlor instrument.