Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I see dancehall reggae and hip-hop as fused together, When I was a kid, they were the two kinds of music that spoke to me and said 'Move!'
Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
I like Kehlani a lot because she's on her grind; she does everything herself. She's writing her own music and, you know, putting all the vocals together, and she's just dope. She just reminds me a lot of me.
When I first started making music, I was pretty drawn to hip-hop beats wrapped together with super-good lyrics. The most important thing in that is wordplay, so that stayed with me when I started writing songs.
I feel like I wasn't making music that meant anything to me until I was 26 years old, so I'm realizing that sometimes it takes three years or five years to understand what the point of even making music together is.
People are like, 'Wow you started your own record label,' and treat me like I'm some sort of innovative genius, when I'm not at all. You've got the Internet and music - you put them together, and people hear your music.
IU and I hosted a music program together, and she had told me that she would be writing a song for me. My fans call me 'Peach,' so when her new song came out, I called to ask her about it, and she confirmed that the song was for me.
That's one of the hardest parts of putting together an album - finding that concept, that unifying idea. Especially as I write mostly in instrumental music, the idea of having a central concept that unifies the music is very important to me.
I started out in comedy gigging and scraping a living together, and eventually worked up to doing shows at the Comedy Store in London in 1979. That led on to me presenting a show in the early days of Channel 4 called 'Whatever You Want,' which had live music and sketches.
Chicago's known for the drill. Keefs, Lil Durks, and whatnot. My music, on the other hand, it has a message to it. I think that's what sets me apart. I think it gets deeper than saying anything on a trap beat. I'm putting stories together, and people are relating to what I am saying.
I was singing doo-wop on the corner under the streetlight with four other guys when it wasn't called doo-wop. We just got together and sang, so that music is inside of me. It's a lot of stuff that has been rolling around in here and becoming this compost and has made me who I am as a singer.
The thing with me is, about that - about rock and all that - years and years of crate-digging, listening to old music, you kind of start to connect the dots. And I was seeing the thread that was connecting everything together, which is pretty much the blues. And everything soul or funk kind of starts with that.