Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For me, it's never been about being famous. I just want to be a successful singer. I wanna work hard... If I'm in the papers, grace, but I want to be there for the right reasons - for my music.
I was so broken when I did the first record. I was living in my parents' basement, I didn't know anyone. I was broken-hearted and writing this really dark record. I was at the bottom of a well.
There's a difference between, you know, God loves unconditionally in my feeling and religion loves conditionally. Religion spends an awful lot of time dictating who God can love and can't love.
I'm always so raw and unguarded. I'm always open to everything and everyone - or at least try - so I can be vulnerable and touched by everything at all times, which in turn is really inspiring.
After moving to England I did some recording and eventually formed an English band, this was together for quite a few years with only a keyboard replacement. The band had no name, just my name.
There are things you're supposed to learn in life. My biggest regret was terminating a pregnancy when I was about 18. Every day, I think about who that baby would be now; it still makes me sad.
Sometimes you want things so bad you will kind of lower your standards, and I've learned that once you do that, it's really hard to go back, to get people to respect you and respect your craft.
If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you've not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren't okay with it, then just wait. You'll find it's fine to be alone once you're embracing it.
It's like pulling teeth to get me to do photo shoots. And I don't mind doing interviews if they're by phone, but I hate to go sit down and have to meet somebody somewhere, you know what I mean.
When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.
The people who came to hear me perform or to buy my records were not the type who would be offended [by the song 'The Vatican Rag']. But I gather that there were other people who were offended.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.
I don't think that you should be perfectly candid and frank about the intimate details of your personal life with the public at large. Subsequently, it creates considerable personal problems.
I'm a mother, and that's really important. Today, the mother and the musician can sit next to each other. Even when the musician is out there in full swing, the mother doesn't get switched off.
I've learned to recognize, a lot of it forced through the process of recovery, that I'm wired wrong in certain ways; the chemical balance of my brain is off in terms of depression a little bit.
It can never be bad to have a foundation as a man - a black man - in a time when women are dying for men. Women have started to become lovers of each other as a result of not having enough men.
My music is about where I am at the time. In 'Raymond vs. Raymond,' I was going through a lot of things, and it came out in my music. My marriage fell apart, and I was suddenly a single father.
Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.
I am always drawn to men that are funny. I do not know why. But I am always drawn to people that are struggling with parts of themselves... But it's like in the end, there has to be confidence.
And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here.
Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.
English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
I used to read a lot of fashion magazines: my favourite was 'Nylon.' I used to cut out all the pictures from magazines, and I had this book where I would keep all of the stuff that inspired me.
Everything I do is a reflection of the duality within me. Musically, I really love things that are very synthetic and unnatural. And I also like the organic and human... the intrinsic, I guess.
When you commit to being a musician, I don't think you're really sure or care about when you're going to pay the bills. I don't think you care about that as much as you care about playing music.
I decided that I wanted to be a voice on every animated cartoon in the history of the world - even shows that haven't been on the air for a very long time, that's going to be harder to pull off.
When someone has a very urgent response, I think it just means that it's triggering something in them that they may not necessarily want to think or talk about - which I see as a positive thing.
I am able to hang with the hardest, the baddest, the worst, and I'm able to hang with the most proper and be at ease. I'm able to hang with any skin colour, any belief. I just fit in everywhere.
I think you are who you are, and your kids will see who you are. So you'd better be a good person, because they are going to see it, and that's going to shape them. They are going to become you.
Every day, it's a different country, different time zone. If you asked me where home was, I've never felt like I've had that. My idea of comfort is to leave a place. Two weeks is sort of my max.
I mean, I really, really love playing solo. Definitely, it's like a labor of love, it's not a huge career. It's not that successful, but it's something I love so much that I'll do it regardless.
I am happy to join AutoNation in the fight against cancer. This disease hits close to home for me with the loss of my mom in 2009. Raising awareness and finding a cure is really important to me.
Just let me go, we have to be able to criticize what we love, to say what we have to say 'cause if you're not trying to make something better, then as far as I can tell, you are just in the way.
How come I can pick my ears, but not my nose? Who made up that rule anyway? How can you say that's the way it is, that's just the way it goes, why don't you decide fore yourself what you can do?
I say if it's going to be done, let's do it. Let's not put it in the hands of fate. Let's not put it in the hands of someone who doesn't know me. I know me best. Then take a breath and go ahead.
You have a bigger view, of something bigger than you, and you have to view that and take that in mind. At times you feel like despair rises up over hope, then other times you feel hopeful again.
I think people that have fear that, 'Oh if I have a kid I won't be able to do this and I won't be able to do that.' It's kind of the opposite. It really gives you energy. It makes people better.
I think a lot of people settle with comfort. I've kinda pushed my whole life not to do that. There's nothing wrong with settling, it's definitely an easier life than the one I've chosen to live.
I only collaborate with the people I rock with in life, period. I rock with people where I really respect their craft and respect what they're doing. That's what collaboration should start from.
I am nervous that the craft of songwriting is taking a nose dive...And since I'm a songwriter and I connect with an interpretative, you know, interpretation of a song, I miss it. I just miss it.
I do feel free, I have patched things up with my ex-husband to the degree of this real friendship. We spend a lot of time together as a family with our son, no way will we be man and wife again.
Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
I decided a handful of years ago that I just want to write songs that you can understand as soon as you put the record on. There's no need to veil what's happening in the song the way I used to.
Blind Willie Johnson is a pretty big vocal influence. He can be very harsh, like gargly, gruff vocals, but also just slip into some very delicate, vulnerable soft stuff. I like that combination.
For days on end, I would hardly speak, and when I did only the vilest sort of gibberish would spout forth. I became morose and fat. Unapproachable, except when eating - and then only by waiters.
For me, it was pretty hard to go into the studio and sing English for the first time, because I always sung in German, and we've been making music for seven years and it's always been in German.
There's this Bruno Mars guy. I met him in Hawaii when was doing Elvis imitations at the age of about five or six years old. There's a lot of old school in him. He's got a depth that I just love.
It would shine a torch into the dirty little corner where the BNP defecate on our democracy, and that would be much more powerful than duffing them up in the street - which Im also in favour of.
The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.