Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We don’t just live in a celebrity take-down culture; we live in a take-down culture. People will find anything about you and twist it to where it’s weird or wrong or annoying or strange or bad. You have to live your life not only in spite of people who don’t understand you - you have to have more fun than they do.
There are some concerns that are universal. Everyone wants to be loved, and everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere in the world. Everyone wants to do something and feel like they have a sense of purpose. These are just the things that I think about and the things that make their way into my songwriting.
I feel a lot of cities are like, you go and you are trying to do your art, and there are so many other artists there who are so brilliant. And it's kind of like they stomp on the scene, and they are like, "You're not already Picasso? Get the hell out of here!" And Memphis is like, "Well, you'll get there one day!"
A lot of times I have the song inside of me and I have to fight to get it out. I'm a very visual person, so I can see the song but I can't hear it. But I think that if your music becomes a war for it to happen, in the end there's a certain kind of aggression in the music. And I think that's a lot more interesting.
I can say, 'I am terribly frightened and fear is terrible and awful and it makes me uncomfortable, so I won't do that because it makes me uncomfortable.' Or I could say, 'Get used to being uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable doing something that's risky. But so what? Do you want to stagnate and just be comfortable?'
When we've got something to say to the world, we will. I'm really happy that people are interested. "So, what's up with the Pixies record? So, what's up with the Pixies record?" One guy just kept asking me and asking me in an interview, and I kept saying, "I just got done telling you no, there's nothing to report."
Being larger than life, or being projected as such in the music business, leads you to question yourself. Some people try to forget about it by taking drugs or too much drink, but I was never like that. I was aware that there were very serious, big questions, and I was petrified about what might be in store for me.
I've definitely become more commercially successful. I think everything has changed over the past two years. People seem to take me seriously now as a songwriter for other artists and as an artist, which is funny to me because I always thought I was good. I guess that's the main change, which is pretty interesting.
I don't see any harm in letting whatever comes out come out of you, even if it's sort of weird, or dark, or painful, or too embarrassing, or whatever. I feel like you might as well get it down for yourself. It can't do anything but help you get to where you want to be by recognizing the thoughts that you're having.
My mom is just someone who's easy to talk to and hang with. My sister, it's always cool to be able to help her out with things. My brother is fun when we're just joking and messing around. And my dad is someone who's helpful with my music and easy to talk to about that stuff because he understands me in that sense.
If you want your rock stars that are completely 100 percent serious about themselves and you want them to pretend like they're 25, I'm probably not the guy for that. But if you want to come and say, 'Hey, you know that guy right there, he's just being himself. I kind of like him for that,' you know, then that's me.
It's funny because I think, as a general rule, that people seem to think that if you do lots of different things over the course of, like, a timeline, it means that you kind of disregard what you did before. But that's not true of me. I still genuinely like everything I did as much as I liked it when I released it.
With bullying and all the stuff going on, words are very important. Words can be more hurtful than anything physically. I got little kids, and it's common sense when you're raising them that the main thing is how you talk to people, and how you treat people. Sometimes I think the world forgets that as we get older.
Any struggle or pain that you experience just gets you to the top, and you can't get there without making the climb. A few years later, you won't remember exactly the way the pain felt or how long it took, you'll just remember the view from the top. In fact, you might smile at the fact you had to work to get there.
My mum was a big fan of E.L.O. and Elvis Costello. She used to play that, consistently, all the time when we were kids. And my dad, he would claim to be a singer... You know, he loves singing, and he used to sing a lot when he was a kid and at parties and stuff like that. So I come from a very party-musical family.
I don't write a whole lot about one person that exists in reality; it's usually characteristics of different people that I combine into a character. I tend to think through and try and make characters behave in a natural way. I follow the character and think about what they would do, what decisions they would make.
I think it's important to earn your fan base and not just try to immediately advance to the top. If you ride to the top quickly, you're liable to fall as quickly. Take your time. It's a long journey ahead of you as an artist. There's nowhere that you're supposed to be other than right now living inside of your art.
When I first started touring, we had a crappy van, and we would all share rooms. So for many years as a grown adult woman, I would share a bed with a bandmate, whether it would be Jimmy Tamborello from the Postal Service or Pierre De Reeder from Rilo Kiley, just a pillow barrier between us sleeping on the same bed.
I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn't have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I'd make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I'd be 64 years old and still making music.
When I turned 40, I invited Johnny Cash to my party, even though I knew there was gonna be 200 people roasting a pig and wild as can be. He didn't come, but the next day, I got a bowl of chili he'd made and a note that said, 'John, I'd love to come to your party, but that would mean I would have to leave my house.'
I was adopted. I was born in Edinburgh, and adopted when I was about two weeks old. And it's a good thing, I think, really, that back then, in '75 when I was born, you were really given a lot more information than you're given now when you're adopted. And you know, you can access that information when you're older.
I like New York. I like Philly. I like San Fran. I like when people are stoked. But Chicago's a real music town, and they're really good to us there. There's just something in the air there; people are just really stoked about music. Every time I go there, I have a great time, and the fandom is really heartwarming.
For instance, I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that's how I see life. I'm interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist, I can do anything. I can say anything. It's about self-expression. It knows no package - there's no such thing. That's what being an artist is.
I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.
I was going on this desert adventure with some friends and we were like, "How amazing would it be to just drag all these mirrors out there?" A lot of times I do things as an impulse and find out my inspirations afterward. Even with songs and lyrics, it can take me years to find out what I was actually trying to do.
Stop judging life! Look at every event as blessed. It is offering you the fastest track to get onto your highest, happiest and most successful state. Your soul is working it all out perfectly. When you accept this you will make life amendments easily and lovingly. Then the pain stops and the joyous creation begins.
I spent so much of my life reading about spirituality and reading about neuroscience and trying different meditation practices. It's a really big part of my life. But it's sometimes hard to talk about. There are so many people in the world who don't live in Southern California and don't spend their time meditating.
I like Kelela. I like Twigs. I love the more old school; I hate to say old school, but I love Peaches; I love Peaches, I love Cat Power. And there's constantly new things coming up. But there's something so beautifully powerful - for me being a woman, when there's a woman doing something, it really strikes a chord.
I go running three times a week - outside in the park, come rain or shine, and I hate every moment of it. I hate everything about it. But I know it's important for health reasons and the reason why I run, in particular, is because my stage work is like cardiovascular work so I don't want to lose my breath on stage.
The more I can make a person comfortable in their environment by taking my ego's hat off and leaving it at the door, then they can dive deep within themselves and we can pull out something interesting that people have never heard before. It's the stuff that's - that no one's ever heard before is really interesting.
Look, you see those groups talkin' about negativity and anger, and they'd do that for two albums, and then you'd see them change up. I knew they couldn't do a Kurt Cobain on their whole career. You can't stay like that all the time. It's like when Hammer tried to go gangster. You can't be something that you're not.
I'm doing a program with NAFME for music and education in schools, and for a week, we will be getting in a bus and traveling across the United States. We're starting at Disney World and ending at the Grand OIe Opry. We will be performing at different schools, and I wrote a song for the program called 'Always Sing.'
It's a big surprise to me about America that there are 40 million people prepared to vote for (Trump). They wouldn't want him as a friend. No matter who you are, you wouldn't want him on your bowling team or to have dinner with him or anything. They would recognize it immediately in a guy. A big blowhard, braggart.
I had just put the casket in the hearse and was watching it drive away, when a beautiful blond woman comes up and embraces me. I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?' She said, 'Daddy, it's me — Tatum!' I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick.
I had a role in developing the doctrine From the Sea, which was later modified to Forward From the Sea. But the way we looked at the situation was that the world we live in is a dangerous place. There's a violent peace out there, there are going to be problems over the horizon, and certainly that proved to be true.
I don't have to worry about what people are thinking and what's going on in the industry. I don't want that stuff to influence what I'm doing. Because I think it stifles you creatively. I don't want to have to care too much about that. All I care about is what the fans think. It's really all I care about, honestly.
There are times when I'm super-overwhelmed, and everything feels like it's hitting me in the face at once, but I think what's keeping me calm, and who I am by staying true to myself, is my whole family being so supportive and keeping me grounded. They treat me the exact same way they treated me years and years ago.
Writing songs out of my faith was a real natural progression. I grew up singing in my dad's choir and singing with my family. Christian music became the music that I identified myself with and was a way that I expressed my faith. Even at a public school I would take my Christian music in and play it for my friends.
I would consider myself a perfectionist, yeah. I don't think that is always that helpful, either. Sometimes it's good to be a little more open-minded; you can overthink things when things are actually fine, and it's that moment that you lose it. Looking back, sometimes I've made mistakes from being a perfectionist.
I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the 'The Glory of the World' play - but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it.
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
My first understanding of HIV and AIDS was like everybody else from my generation. In the mid-'80s, we heard about this, and it was terrifying, because we knew nothing about how to respond to it appropriately, and we didn't really understand about how the virus is passed. There was a lot of misconception about that.
YI teamed up with the Allstate Foundation to basically inform teens why it's important to drive safe. I feel I'm new on the road, so it's important to do these three main things: The first one is buckle up, the second one is slow down, don't speed, and the third one is don't let your friends distract you in the car.
You know, for me, the realization that two people should have the right to form a sacred union regardless of their gender was strengthened when I saw a performance of the play The Normal Heart in 1985. After feeling the love those two men had for each other, I dare anybody not to want them to get married by the end.
I'm not someone who can sing anything... And my favorite singers aren't people whose voice you would say is amazing. I'm a big Bob Dylan fan, a huge David Bowie fan... none of those people have orthodox, cabaret voices. These are people where what they're singing about is just as important as how they're singing it.
You know, your first album is about really amazing things. Your first album is always about coming of age, first love, first loss, usually you suffer a first loss of someone that you love to death, even, you know, really big life lessons, things you learn from your parents' divorce or from the travels that you took.
I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and none of the other Backstreet Boys live in Georgia. So a lot of times, when people come to my house they're like, 'Hey, is A.J. here?' Or, 'Is Kevin here?' Or, 'Is Nick in the bathroom?' People think we live together and we spend all the time in the world together, but we really don't.
The recording process was basically me meeting with different writers, going into their studio, starting a song and just hanging out and chatting and getting to know how they work. Everybody has a different writing process so there was a lot of getting to know people, which can be fun and stressful at the same time.
If we were to use the success of 'Need You Now' as the barometer for every other song, then we'll probably be highly disappointed. That song will probably undoubtedly be the biggest song of our career. We can hopefully have success for 20 years, but we may not ever have the success of that one particular song again.
I know some people are like "I'm depressed and I'm a struggling artist" and that really works for some people, but that doesn't work for me. I have to be really happy, even when I'm writing my depressing songs; I have to come through that stage before I can write. I have to be in a good place. I'm a positive person.