Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My mom played me all kinds of music, from Ella Fitzgerald to Celine Dion. I listened to everything growing up, old and new.
My mom was a rapper and she really shaped me as a woman, and the music that she was letting me listen to as a child really pushed me in the direction that I'm going in right now.
I started piano when I was four. My mom taught me. And then I went to Manhattan School of Music during high school, like every Saturday. And then I went to Berklee for college, in Boston.
John Martyn is my biggest hero. My mom got me into his music when I was a kid. I've looked up to him more than anyone as a songwriter. And Bert Jansch is one of the pillars of acoustic music, the holy grail.
My mom says that she caught me one day in front of the TV watching opera. I was trying to sing back the opera. She saw that I really liked music, and so she put me in piano lessons when I was about three years old.
I felt like hip-hop was my music, it was like my outsider music... but then my mom started answering our phone, 'Yo, what's up.' She was hearing me talk to my friends. I was like, 'No, mom, don't cop the hip-hop talk.'
One of the first cassette tapes I ever purchased was the 'Rambo III' score. I was not allowed to see 'Rambo,' but my mom would allow me to buy the music, so I would listen to that score over and over and imagine the movie.
I have no idea what was the first record I ever bought, but I think I asked my mom to buy me... um... a collection of Beethoven when I was a little girl because I became very addicted to his music. It might have been piano sonatas.
Yeah, I didn't ever think about music as a career. Like, it was never - it's just something like an extracurricular activity that my mom put me in. And as every South Asian, you know, like, child, I was like - oh, OK, I can do medicine.
People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
I started playing drums at about seven or eight. My mom used to let me play with the pots and pans, and instead of telling me to stop like most moms would, she just let me do it. So the noise kind of turned into music. From that point on, musically, that's what I want to do: start creating beats.