Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I try to talk as less as possible and maximise the music part. I have tons of songs on my set list and I want to sing all of them, or as much as possible. If I talk more it'll eat into the time allotted for me.
My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York, and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by.
I felt like an outsider, so listening to a bunch of outsiders' music like Bjork and Patti Smith made me feel better. But at the same time, I didn't have anyone singing specifically 100% about things I could relate to.
For me, when I grew up playing music, I played music in church and people were shouting and having a big time, and church wasn't something where it was subdued. If you played something, you brought it to church with you.
If I hadn't had that decade in the music industry and, perhaps more importantly, time to reach the point of being sick and disgusted with it, I wouldn't have written 'Kill Your Friends.' That book gave me my whole career.
What most people know about me, they know through my music. This time, I've tried to open that door as wide as possible. These songs are a giant step closer to who I really am and what my music is all about. Hence the title.
It's the first time I have returned to my roots - like going back to be a trio. The fans really wanted me to go back on stage and do the Supremes music, so I went about trying to make it happen. We'll go on tour in the summer.
That's what music has always been to me: a feel. I've listened to the Stones many times and it still makes me have that feeling of joy every time. They are still around and put on a really exciting show. We also give it 120 percent.
People ask me all the time which I would prefer doing more, but I honestly can't say. When I'm filming, I'm like, 'No, this is my favorite,' and when I'm writing music and recording and performing, it's like, 'This is definitely it.'
I grew up doing musical theatre in Orlando, Florida. When I was 14, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - a deliveryman heard me singing and offered to deliver my demo tape to Sony Music. I was just really lucky.
I've never got on with the British press because they've always given me such a hard time. Once they build a band up they just want to do people down. They shouldn't concentrate on the colour of someone's shirt they should listen to the music.
I miss the physicality of drumming. There's immediateness about it that I'm always striving for in my acting. Maybe I'm in the wrong profession. I certainly wish I could spend more time pursuing music. It feels like a part of me I'm neglecting.
With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly their physical appearance. With female musicians, that's made a big thing of, and I think people, certainly with me, have appreciated a bit of mystery.
I suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago - you'd have to put that into better English for me, thank you - they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.
The thing with acting is I'm at the liberty of someone who wants to book me. With music, I can do it all the time. With acting, I could, too, if I wanted to write a script and do that whole thing, but music is a constant thing. Acting, I have to audition.
I think it takes a lot of trickery to keep up with the media and its perception of you. I don't know if I have it in me most of the time to care. The music is made first, and the interviews or photos to keep it alive come later as a necessary evil, I suppose.
I've got a very short attention span, and this has been part of the reason I'm so kind of dumbfounded at the fact that I've still stayed with music. Nothing has ever stuck for me, and music's the only thing that's managed to stick out for a long period of time.
My mum loved Joan Armatrading and used to play her records all the time and even took me to see her a couple of times when I was really quite young. I didn't really like her music back then because my mum was always playing it, but I've grown to appreciate it more.
The big thing on the horizon for me is video. I feel like it's the closest thing to a perfect mix between music and design, because it has the motion and it has the dynamics of music, while at the same time having the aesthetic components of design. It's a nice mix.
San Francisco has always been my favorite booing city. I don't mean the people boo louder or longer, but there is a very special intimacy. When they boo you, you know they mean you. Music, that's what it is to me. One time in Kezar Stadium they gave me a standing boo.
Sometimes, the songs that really affected me were not from the artist catalogue of their music, like the song 'Thunder Road' by Bruce Springsteen. I never got into any of his other music, but that song, to this day, is in my top three lyrical masterpieces of all time.
Heavy metal to me implies a relentless, pounding, hitting-people-over-the-head music. Trend setters tend to dismiss it as basic and simple, but all the time that little trends keep coming and going, the Bob Segers, Bruce Springsteens and the Billy Squiers keep staying.
I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.
At the end of the day, I want to spend time with my daughter, and this schedule enables me to do that while still having fun hosting '106 & Park.' I'm not really eager to get back into music just yet; I'm really eager to get into another movie before I put out an album.
I started playing the piano when I was 6 years old 'cause my folks tried to get me away from the gramophone. And I just - I lived for music since I could think. And they got me piano lessons. So by the time I was 13, I was quite an accomplished piano player and musician.
I think it took me until - my twenties were really a time of exploration and experimentation with different groups and different types of music. Then I kind of developed the sound, which first appeared, I guess, on my first solo album 'Englaborn,' which came out in 2001.
Yeah, you know, I performed occasionally. I was in such despair because I just - if I didn't have my music to connect with, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing. There was never a 'B' plan here; it was just this. So it took me a long time to find my way.
Growing up, I can remember singing along with my ma all of the time. I wouldn't say she necessarily 'taught' me how to sing, but she was definitely the first person to inspire me to sing and the first to intrigue me vocally. I've always had a natural ear for music, though.
When you get to your teenage years, you want to find something that you identify with. It's almost a slight rebellion; you don't want to listen to what your parents listen to anymore; you want to find your own music. That, for me, was hearing the Fugees for the first time.
I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother's aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.
I wanted to do it my way with my career, and I had this arrogant notion that people weren't just interested in my music but me as a person. That was my bit of arrogance, I guess. That's something I learned from Madonna. I was a fan right from the first time I heard 'Holiday.'
It's always so rewarding, gratifying to me, as an artist and a writer, to see how this music gets more important for a lot of people as time goes by. And it's not just nostalgia. It's a feeling of it's really relevant to their lives, even though it's 20 or 25 years old or more.
I can't stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, 'How could he say that about my music?' Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I'd be exploding all the time. I'd be burned out just from reading reviews.
The first song I remember listening to in a language other than German was 'Goldfinger,' by Shirley Bassey. I was seven years old at the time and I had no idea which language it was or who the lady was singing it, but it touched me and I realised that it was the sort of music I liked.
I make up cassettes all the time - to take on the road with me - a song from this album, a song from that album. That's the way I listen to music; it's like one of those K Tel things: it's from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads.
Growing up, any time I would sit down with my grandfather to learn or talk about Carnatic music, he would bring up G. N. Balasubramaniam. Listening to the recordings he would play me, I was dazzled by GNB's voice and how he was able to execute ideas that I could barely wrap my head around.
For me, I like old-school rap music. There was a time when music was so, so rich overall, and the content of what people talked about was so deep on every level, song-for-song, pound-for-pound, and on radio, there was so much content. I gravitate more towards that type of music, to be honest.
My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online. I started with a website, Jasonmraz.com, pre-YouTube. You could e-mail me directly, and I would send you a CD.
A guy wrote a blog, way back when the Internet first started; the comments were so negative that it actually stopped me doing music for some time - about two, three years. It was after this one hip-hop project - Redfoo and Dr'Kroon. I wasn't used to it. I didn't like it. It lowered my self-esteem.
When I was 16, 17 years old, I became aware of music coming out of Olympia, Wash., which is the state capitol and about an hour south of Seattle. And there were bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile and Heavens To Betsy, and for the first time, I heard my story being explained to me, being sung to me.
There's a room in my house where my stereo, records, CDs, and books are housed. I spend a lot of time in that room, sitting in my chair beside the fireplace, reading and listening to music. Sometimes I just stand before the shelves and look at my books, because every single one of them means something to me.
I was always kind of against streaming, but I've been traveling so much, and I usually carry a huge hard drive of digital music with me, but I haven't had time to deal with it, so I've been doing streaming. And I had this incredible breakthrough of weightlessness where I've really been loving streaming music.
For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.
There's always so much music around me now, it seems like everything has to be something with music, so in my spare time I try not to listen to anything. It's so hard for me to listen to something without trying to see a benefit in it: 'Maybe I'll make my own version of that track or maybe I'll do this or that.'
I decided to not be so dismissive of my music in favor of my acting. Acting has been such a consistent thing for me; a lot of times in the past, I wouldn't have had the confidence with my music to really make it a part of my schedule. I would easily push it to the side, or I would easily take up time that was needed for it.
It's always difficult to define what jazz is or what jazz isn't. To me, the only definition that I can think of is it's music where a lot of different elements are played at the same time. The harmonic, the melodic... You're pushing the boundaries on every level. That could be true of rhythm and blues as well. I'm a musician.
I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.
When I first started making music, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just wanted to write songs. I didn't have a concept. I didn't think it through. I was just flailing around doing what comes naturally. It took me a really long time to step back and deal with what I was doing with any kind of perspective or self-awareness.
I would go to an aunt's house, and she would let me play music, and she had 'The Last Poets' album. At that time, albums didn't have explicit stickers on them, so some of the songs had profanity on them, and I was moved by that. I would listen to those songs, to the flow, and I'd balance it back and forth with the nursery stuff I had.
I grew up in a renaissance period, a very lucky time when the greatest music ever made was also the most commercial. We'll never see that again, so for me, there's only one criteria, which is greatness. That's all I care about. Is what I'm doing reaching for greatness? Whether I achieve it or not, that is one hundred percent of my criteria.