Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It feels like your subconscious can be way ahead of you, as a songwriter. You can write a song that you think is about one thing and months later you're playing it and thinking, hang on, this is completely informing where I am now.
I'm urging all women, I ask them the first time men hit you, please walk away. There is help out there. There are a lot of places that you can go and get help. That's the first step to your freedom and to your life is to walk away.
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean. Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens. Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance. And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.
A couple of months ago I hauled my white ass on stage alongside Chaka Khan and Stevie Wonder for Divas Las Vegas, singing in front of a celebrity audience. If I can hold my own there, I can hold my own at Top of the Pops, trust me.
I get paralyzingly nervous a lot of times, so I tried bravado. The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it intimidating. I think my whole career can be boiled down to the one word I always say in meetings: 'strength.'
I don't know what it's like for a book writer or a doctor or a teacher as they work to get established in their jobs, but for a singer, you've got to continue to grow or else you're just like last night's cornbread...stale and dry.
I'm a very lucky man. I get to do the thing I want most in life, write songs and sing them for people, and ride bikes. I love my family. I love my home. I get to work with people I've admired my whole life. It's a pretty good life.
I don't really have any kind of rigorous or definite routine before I go onstage. I like to eat at least an hour or two before I go on. If I can't do that, I just wait until after. I try and drink lots of water before I go onstage.
I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.
When your car is about to go off a cliff, it’s a weird time to be thinking about gas mileage and drag coefficients; better to take the right control action—look out the window and steer or use the brake until you’re back on course.
Grace Kelly was written after these musicians were trying to mold me into what I should be. I was really angry and so I wrote the song and mailed them the lyrics. They didn't call me back, but two years later it's come full circle.
You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.
To paraphrase Paul from the New Testament, he has a great soliloquy about love, where he's basically saying, if I've figured out the secrets of the universe but I don't have love, figuring out the secrets of universe means nothing.
I know that I can sing really loud. It's like having that really big Evinrude engine on the back of your fishing boat. But I've been trying to be more dynamic with my voice, and not just singing on 10 all of the time out of terror.
You have to reflect honestly what's around you in your music. I think a lot of people are just obsessed with their own relationships, so that is an honest reflection of what they see. A lot of people don't go much deeper than that.
Some people might be groomed for success; I've just always thought I've got a hell of a lot of things to learn and places to go. Creatively, I couldn't stay on the same treadmill. I chose to be off-centre and do collaborative work.
One of the most important things that I did to turn my life around was to realize and to accept that from this minute, that's all we have. Everything that happened behind us we cannot change so you might as well look to the future.
Girls will probably - if she's a lady - never do the No. 2 around you. If they're not a lady, she might poo. You might ask her, 'What's that smell?' And she'll be like 'I don't know!' But it really might be her. Because it happens.
When you become of age, you can sometimes feel like you have to force maturity. I've been lucky that I didn't feel that I had to try. Growth is something that is going to come, you just need to sit back and let it happen naturally.
I was always a tomboy as a kid. I always had boyfriends. I was just a regular girl growing up in the late '50s and early '60s, but I was never really attracted to what the girls were attracted to: makeup, my appearance, homemaking.
Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you're communicating with people, and you're not in a void. On the other hand, because you're always creating and transforming, art always separates you - always.
What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away.
Look at Obama - he is now [2015] trying to help us environmentally but he should have done it eight years ago. He's trying to salvage his legacy and trying to do something good but we needed for him to show leadership from day one.
In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
As a rapper, you sort of act in music videos and in the persona you adopt onstage. You kinda have to put yourself out there and be courageous even to be a rapper. So, to step into acting was not that difficult a transition to make.
It was a very vulnerable time going from being insecure about my body and who I am to becoming comfortable with me. I had to tune out what the hell everybody else had to say about who I was. When I was able to do that, I felt free.
While we [people] keep putting a face on HIV and AIDS, I think what we forget is that there are human beings, just people with emotions and feelings, women who want to be loved, men who want to be loved, who want to feel something.
I think Phil Collins is one of the most underrated musicians, singers, performers - he is absolutely amazing, I think, and I think he's probably got a bit of a rough ride occasionally because he became so mainstream and so popular.
Richie Faulkner is very respectful to the songs that he plays from when [founding member] K.K. [Downing] was in the band. He plays them incredibly. And he's got his own nuances and his own techniques that he puts in - as he should.
I'm a fan boy when it comes to Michael Buble. He's just so good at 'it'. He's got a voice of this generation, but he's like a time capsule; he's got a voice that could have fit in anywhere over the last hundred years. It's stellar.
I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.
I think Pete did have a hard time as a kid with his appearance. But don't all kids have a hard time? God, I had a hard time, too. I was little with bow legs and rickets. I used to get picked on like everybody used to get picked on.
One day, my father brings a cassette. He's showing me this, and he's like, 'Look at this guy, his name is Anthony Santos, like you.' I popped it on and started hearing the songs, the music, and I was like, 'Wow, this sounds great.'
My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.
I miss the days when girls would wear full long dresses and just stand onstage and sing. That's what I'm trying to bring back: that timeless element. I want to create music that people will be listening to in fifty years, you know?
I have found so much joy and so much pride in contributing and being a team member, and then stepping back and watching someone else get the applause. That has been really satisfying in a way that I wouldn't have probably imagined.
It's not worth comparing; Kara and SNSD are both Korean girl groups. I'm proud that Korean girl groups are being recognized in Japan Everyone has their preferences. There are people who like SNSD and there are people who like Kara.
Honestly, live is my favorite way of performing. Every show is a completely different energy. With recording, it's not really as organic as it can be. But I feel like I'm a lot more fluid, and I can be a little bit more aggressive.
Every single tune you know from the 1940s until the 1970s was written, arranged, and demoed in the Brill Building. OK, maybe not every song, but writers from Benny Goodman to Lieber & Stoller to Neil Diamond all kept offices there.
My most embarrassing moment was probably when I was on tour and I would throw the mic out of my hand and catch it but one time I dropped it and I felt so stupid. My most exhilarating moment is every time I step on stage to perform.
A great hang is mandatory. But in all of my years as a traveling musician, on a whole it's been pretty damn magical. There have been a couple duds along the way, but most time, I'm in awe of the guys who want to play on my records.
I love songs, and I love songwriting, and there's a standard of songwriting within Chicago blues in particular. I don't like the sad blues, necessarily; the Chicago blues is what I like, which is the kind of blues you can dance to.
I lived in a cabin in the woods in Oregon, and I'd basically given up on the music industry for an indefinite amount of time. And while I was out there, I came up with a very specific vision of what I wanted my music to sound like.
Opening Ceremony is my number one favorite place to shop here. It's the only place I'll shop in New York with my son. All of the sales people are so cool; the music is great; it's just like a big fun house, so he stays entertained.
I'm self-deprecating, but I'm an artist, too. I have to write new songs to chronicle stuff for myself. I write a song like 'Middle Age' or 'Responsibility' or 'I Just Work Here,' and it's about how bleak life can be. But it's real.
I'm not sure about the selling part, but I've always found that the things I've worn on tour have moved over to what people wear every day. Sometimes the things I wore in the beginning before I had money were things I put together.
Kindness to me is only powerful if it has the cruel streak behind it. If someone is kind all the time under all circumstances, they're just simple-minded. Kindness is only worth something if you have the cruel streak to back it up.
You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you'd experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.
Wow I can't belive I won. This is awesome. Don't trip and fall. I'm gonna get to thank the fans, this is so cool. Oh, Kanye West is here. Cool haircut. What are ya doing there... Ouch... I guess I'm not gonna get to thank the fans.
I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny.