Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you come on my property, I've got you from the second that you enter on. There's little lasers... my TVs come on in my room and fall just right on you. So, there's no way to sneak up on me. And I've got a loud dog.
I know acts and I'm not going to name names but these people sold ten million copies the first time and the second album sells three million and it's considered a failure and they're dropped and that's really a shame.
From very early on, I've realized that and I have a mission statement with my songs to entertain, to encourage and to challenge the Body of Christ. That's always kind of the focus of the songs that I write for myself.
Every song that I record, I love, it's like my new favorite. But one that really stands out to me is a song I debuted on tour with Trey Songz called "Angel". It's a really acoustic sounding and it's a really big song.
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.
You choose to be happy, and in life we have as many good days as bad days. I try to find and record those songs that pull you through the bad days, and keep you believing that the good days are just around the corner.
I've never been a fan of getting someone to sing the generic, love song lyrics and sticking on top of the feature. If I'm gonna collaborate at all, it has to be in a way that makes the track a whole and not two parts.
The distance between your knowledge of truth and your obedience is called lack of integrity. And the amount of negative behavior-or lack of integrity-a person exhibits is directly proportional to their amount of pain.
I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.
You can disappear inside of yourself and become an empty shell with depression in mind. It's that feeling of being invisible. Sometimes when I wake up I don't feel like my head is attached to my body - there's nothing.
It's not disappearing in that sense, and it's not disappearing in an artistic sense - trying to make something beautiful that means something. If it's something beautiful that means something just to us, that's enough.
I want to know where joy lives. I'd interview scientists, religious leaders and heads of state. I'd want to find out exactly what makes people happy. I'd want to look into the biology, the chemistry of the human brain.
All the musicians I loved growing up were men. I loved Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger. I loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. Even today, I love Van McCann from Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Healy from The 1975.
What is hard to remember when you're in the middle of it is that when you get through to the other side, you always walk away with a gift. If you can stand in there and not walk away from it, you get transformed by it.
Because we live in a condition of ubiquitous music and media, and near infinite technological memory, it is much easier for local cultures to find an audience that resonates with their music, whether local or globally.
I get really nervous if pigeons are flying around before shows. I can't stand them after one once flew in through my bathroom window and went for me while I was having a wee. That was enough. I think pigeons target me.
Not to toot my own horn, but I'm kind of easy on the eyes, I have my own swag, I love fashion, I'm not in a relationship, I don't have kids, I can rap and I have a very bold personality, so I can compete with the guys.
It always baffles me how people can lift you up so high and make it seem like they love you then you do one thing wrong and it's all of a sudden you the devil and you evil and everything you do from then on isn't right.
I think just dreaming big and having aspirations is important. So you know I want to be the greatest of all time at what I do and if you're not trying to be the greatest at what you do then you're not doing it for real.
The best advice I could give is be yourself. Before I was on the American Idol show I made goals for myself. I said, "Who do I want to be, and what will I compromise, or won't I compromise?" And then, I stuck with that.
I went from being an underpaid ad man to quite a successful photographer in a very short time. Success breeds confidence and as soon as I got properly confident, I developed my own style. After that I never looked back.
My wife convinced me to try doing the restorations digitally. I thought I could learn the photo editing software over the Thanksgiving weekend. It took me until May of the next year before I sold anything I did with it.
I came from the last couple of years in a generation where we didn't have a computer around so we didn't waste as much time on the internet as we do now so I had large chuncks of time which to devote to doing something.
I sort of trust myself as a musician to experiment more and to know when things are more effective when they're spare and when a song can hold up to a lot of different instrumentations. So I'm more willing to go for it.
Our original name was Wild Country, but when we first went to The Bowery, they had the name of all 50 states around the edge of the club, so we went to the sign that said 'Alabama' and stuck our band name underneath it.
I'm always trying to encapsulate how we, as emotional beings, interact with the world and the machines and technology around us - being able to emote through those things. They're not antithetical or mutually exclusive.
I feel so blessed to just have done what I had done. To be able to just use what God has given me is a blessing. You know, never mind the Grammys, never mind the records, never mind all of that. Just to be able to sing.
You find yourself in this place where you really get to find out what you're made of, and what I found was that when I was at my time of greatest need, there were people who appeared in my life, and helped me through it.
The acceleration and saturation leads to things becoming outmoded, or out of fashion before they've even happened. That's a pretty complicated situation. Hype becomes autonomous from its object and runs away with itself.
Seeing people catch a feeling in their spirit and sprint the aisles of the church while my cousins played driving, uplifting gospel stuck with me. I let that same feeling wash over me when I experience and perform music.
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.
Just the same as I mix each track to connect them together to build a story, it's the same with the message, each scripture and passage is building up a story and a testimony in a way that's going to connect with people.
For Rostropovich, every single note that he played had a special kind of human meaning behind it. And this was something that he expressed and demanded of everyone who worked with him, who wanted to rise up to that level.
The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.
We all know that there are many people that can play the instrument perfectly today, up and down with technical perfection, but does the sound connect internally, do they touch people's hearts, how creative are they.... ?
I think it is good for people who are incarcerated or who are bound up one way or the other-people like Lily Kimball and all the prostitues of Memphis. This gal, she needs some wings, and a good song can make that happen.
When you make it to eighty-four, then you're ready to sit back and think universal and systematic. I was a philosophy major a long, long time ago. At Stony Brook. You had something to do with some state university school?
Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.
So many times we take things like eyesight for granted cause it's so natural. We wake up and we see, we wake up and we walk. It's just so natural for us. So, for me not to be able to see for 2-3 days straight, it was hell.
Being an artist and a musician, I have witnessed the previous generation taking the art form, not as a way of making a living, but as a belief, an almost maniacal, sometimes insane devotion and commitment to communication.
We all have the power to choose how we are going to handle every situation we are faced with throughout our lives. We are in control of the decision we make whether it's about work, relationships, parenting, or our health.
I try to do everything to say, 'OK, will my mother like this? Will she be pleased? Will she be proud of that? How do I know she's happy and she's smiling down at me from heaven?' And that's what I try to go by and walk by.
When people ask that question, it's very hard to nail down a formula or a circumstance that I always write in, but I definitely do believe that there have been moments, musically, when I have channeled something, you know?
I have always made commercial music. The people who vote for the Grammy nominees are mostly in their 40s and have other jobs or are musicians themselves. They like music that they can relate to - they like commercial music.
I tell everybody, 'If you want to get to know me, if you listen to those three records, you'll have a really good idea.' They were released at different time periods in my life, and those are the things I was going through.
One year, my parents hired someone in the village to dress up as Krampus for a surprise visit to our home - and they regretted it for ever. I went to the door and this huge creature was standing there. I think I passed out.
I don't really think about having had a hard life. It was just my life, and it's all I knew. It made me who I am - all the good and bad - and it's where all of the songs on Here For The Party came from. I've lived them all.
I'm the most sampled and stolen. What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, too... I got a song about that... But I'm never gonna release it. Don't want a war with the rappers. If it wasn't good, they wouldn't steal it.
I was raised on gospel. I remember hip-hop and rock music were secular, so basically, for my first ten years living in Detroit, I was on gospel. But when I moved to Houston, that's when I got to open up my musical horizons.
From all the years that I've been in the business, you know that ballads are what impact. Mid-tempos are great, you can sell some records on 'em, but when it comes down to it, ballads are the meat-and-potatoes on the album.