Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't get mad with people, like, 'Oh, but that's not what the song was about...' It's also nice to know that people are mindlessly dancing to a song about the US Government's stance on same-sex marriages... especially straight jocks. I love that idea. I think that's the beauty of music - it's different for everybody.
I've never done an album like this. With Biophilia, I was being like Kofi Annan - I had to be the pacifist to try to unite the impossible. Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe.
My dad was very explosive, God rest his soul. He could fly off the handle like no one I've ever known, and I have definitely got that in my personality: that ability to sort of smash the house up and then say, 'Put the kettle on,' to have that kind of attitude of, 'Well, I'm OK now, so everybody else has got to be OK.'
It's actually really stereotypical that someone should be 40 and mellow out, but I think it's more about trying to conjure up a different intensity in my head, one where I'm more focused as a singer and hands-on with music and more exacting, and less trying to furiously fit a thousands thoughts into a four minute song.
One of the things I did to make myself feel better is that I kicked up my running even more. I knew that I had to stay active, that I had to keep living as if my life was actually going to unfold naturally because when you stop, when you freeze, and you think about it, that's when the demons come and can drag you down.
As an adolescent I saw the Specials at the Glass House in Pomona, and that was life changing. I dressed the part - except not well, because it was a thrift suit. I looked more like David Byrne than a rudeboy; I still have a hard time finding suits that fit me. But I had my braces and I had my Docs. It was unbelievable.
So one day he found her crying Coiled up on the dirty ground Her prince finally came to save her & the rest you can figure out But it was a trick & the clock struck twelve Well make sure to build your home brick by boring brick or the wolf's gonna blow it down Keep your feet on the ground When your head's in the clouds
I hope people half my age and twice my age will listen to my music - I want it to live forever and for my audience to feel like they have a friend in my music. Music is a spirit. It heals. It's an amazing thing to be loved and appreciated, and sometimes, music has not just been my best friend, it's been my only friend.
I'm naturally shy, so the social media thing is new to me. I haven't really figured out how my voice sounds on social media, you know? I don't want to tweet everyday just for the sake of tweeting. I want to make sure whatever I do there is honest. Social media can very quickly get fake, and I don't want to be that guy.
Sometimes I just start humming something, find a melody I like a lot, and if it sticks around for a couple days, a few words will lock themselves into place. I might just get the first line. Then words just keep falling into the syllables. The choruses kind of write themselves and verses I have to work at a little bit.
The main things to rebel against - over-production, too much technology, overthinking. It's a spoiled mentality; everything is too easy. If you want to record a song, you can buy Pro Tools and record four hundred guitar tracks. That leads to overthinking, which kills any spontaneity and the humanity of the performance.
I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.
If I eat something a little crazy or if I feel sluggish, I know I have to eat better the next day and work out. I work out, I do circuit training so I try to keep my heart rate up whether I'm doing cardio, lifting weights or jumping rope. I like to mix it up. I also take Zumba classes - I love those, those are a blast.
I feel so lucky to have lived the life that I did and to be surrounded by the people I love. I've got eight kids, and they're always laughing all the time. It's like music to my ears. I think that my frame of mind these days is probably happier than I've ever been, which is kind of odd, coming close to the finish line.
The great thing about Nashville back in the day was that the old guys hung out where the young guys were. The established writers like Harlan Howard and Jack Clement gave us encouragement and passed the guitar, you know? Chet Atkins let me sit in on his sessions. Everybody was good to us, and everybody loved the music.
Despite fashioning myself a very unconventional lifestyle with my music, I had ended up in a really conventional situation. I was also guilty of becoming a people-pleaser, which is absolutely exhausting and not a sustainable way of living. It can be so damaging to fall into that trap, especially in close relationships.
If I'm uncomfortable on stage, everybody can see it. I'm not very good at hiding it. I like long, loose jacket dresses - anything that I can literally have room to move in - not that I'm a very big dancer, but because sometimes I'm sitting down at the keyboard, and then sometimes I'm standing. It just has to feel good.
It's not enough to raise awareness. You have to give people solutions, and you have to invite them to get involved in whatever way they can, whether that's doing volunteer work or taking a portion of their salary and figuring out where they want that money to go. You have to find ways to inspire people to get involved.
When I was five years old I was molested and just, you know. I remember feeling, literally right before it happened, I just could not believe that this person was going to do this to me. That thing followed me all my life. The shame of thinking my molestation was my fault - it led me to believe I wasn't worth anything.
It's the age old thing: If you want to get elected, blame immigrants. It worked in the 20th century and it works now, and it's heart-breaking to see people make the same mistakes. They're looking at a complicated world, but they just keep blaming immigrants, and it's really disturbing that people haven't got past that.
Around 2010, I kind of looked up and said, I'm 40 years old. You know, I chose music. I don't have a husband. I don't have any kids. Like, I chose music. So, I had to make a decision. Like, do I want to do something else, or do I want to go from journeyman to master? And I realized, I want to be a really good musician.
There's not like a science to it, necessarily, but I'm also the kind of person who spends a long time in the studio. I will spend my entire advance just getting it done, which is probably stupid, but I don't have extravagant taste. I mean, I paid for it, so there you go. Why not? The recording process is also very fun.
While a lot of my day, like most people's, is spent thinking about me, I can see how it's a universal thing: the competition, the clashes of personality that fuel the world and fill the world, are the exact same ones that take place just between two people. I just think politics is a form, en masse, of human relations.
I hadn't performed or been in the public eye for about 16 years. When my husband passed away, I was obliged to go back to work to take care of our kids. I also wanted to do a record in memory of him. So we did Gone Again. During that process, I had to be photographed and had to go back to doing articles and interviews.
I actually think I left 10 to 20 pounds on the stage, because it went up pretty easily. Seven hundred has been an accomplishment I've wanted for a while, but the last few months, as my training has gotten better, I knew this was going to be a reality. That's when I knew I was getting close and this could really happen.
I saw certain things that I think maybe other kids are protected from. Like, I saw my parents struggling. I knew that we were cutting out coupons and buying dented cans because they were cheaper. And all our furniture was from the garbage. It was just - and to me because I was a kid, all that stuff was really exciting.
I think that of all the diseases in the world, the disease that all humankind suffers from, the disease that is most devastating to us is not AIDS, it's not gluttony, it's not cancer, it's not any of those things. It is the disease that comes about because we live in ignorance of the wealth of love that God has for us.
You listen to Bob Dylan and you can't help but think of the 60s, it's very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the music doesn't come from them it comes from the universe and it's to be shared. At best, we're skilled presenters, and I say that at best.
What I'm interested in is the protection of children from violence, and they are exposed to violence every single day in the form of, as it's called, the news. Then you wonder why the children are running around, doing the things in the streets, doing the things that they've seen the adults doing in the so-called news.
He had regrets, of course, but not so many that he would lose any sleep over them. Life surprised him now and then and he didn't much care for surprises, unless he was passing them out. But - what was to be done? You had to deal with the reality, he had learned that over the years, no matter how much you didn't like it
In recent years, you've probably read the articles about major recording artists who have decided to practically give their music away, for this promotion or that exclusive deal. My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet...is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.
If you’re the girl that needs a boyfriend, and once she loses that boyfriend needs to replace it with a different boyfriend, it’s just this constant stream of boyfriends all the time. I don’t feel like I ever want to be that girl. I want to be the girl that when she falls in love, it’s a big deal and it’s a rare thing.
I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that's fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that's fine. And it might not be right, because I'm the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It's the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.
Nine Inch Nails was an experiment with me in discipline. I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything. Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting. I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100 percent, because I had never reached true failure.
When you are giving a certain portion of your life to people and you're selling it sexually, you're selling it sensually, and you're selling it romantically - for you to then take that portion that you give only to fans away and to give it to one person, it kind of... if they don't approve, it might be crickets for me.
There's variables at every single gig. I look forward to those every night. We have a lot of things that happen in our show, a lot of people from the outside watching the show might think it's one schtick after the next. We promised ourselves we have to be there mentally. We have to be aware. We are forced to be aware.
New York was very frightening and very overwhelming, and I didn't really know anybody. My sister had some friends there, and I stayed with them, then I moved in with a friend of a friend. I was very outside my comfort zone. Then again, I was pretty uncomfortable in general - but I knew it was where I was supposed to be.
I sincerely believe patriarchy to be at the root of all of our social diseases and feminism, it's antidote, to be a prerequisite to peace on earth. feminism provides an alternative way of thinking and structuring things that focuses on and prioritizes relationships and de-emphasizes hierarchy, separation and domination.
The very fact that the planet is probably unsustainable with all that we've done to it and are doing to it, it's an appalling piece of evidence. It shows our complacency, our lack of passion or inclination to be authentic and really understand our true values. It's consistently depressing, but nevertheless, we carry on.
before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.
I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this - I'm not dissing him - this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn't even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second.
You know you get a tube of toothpaste... such a bloody con. You squeeze and squeeze and nothing more comes out? Well, take a pair of scissors and cut it about an inch and a half from the bottom and it's absolutely packed with stuff! I do that, then cut off the top bit, so I can stick that back on and it doesn't dry out!
Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus.
Kitty Wells was the first and only Queen of Country Music, no matter what they call the rest of us. She was a great inspiration to me as well as every other female singer in the country music business. In addition to being a wonderful asset to country music, she was a wonderful woman. We will always remember her fondly.
I couldn't have children, I tried to for years. I've never been pregnant in my life. When I was a girl and fooling around I was scared to death I'd get pregnant, and then when I got married and wanted to have children I couldn't have any. But I don't miss it. I did for awhile, but I realize that I am everybody's mother.
I don't know that I'm beautiful or glamorous. I'm a pretty artificial looking person. I sure am flattered when people think I'm beautiful, but I think I'm leaning towards more cartoonish than beautiful. But I'm comfortable with who I am. And since I wasn't born as a natural beauty, I just make the most of what I've got.
I don't really drink, but I've been around a lot of drinking and, at 18, when you start playing in bars, you start to witness the good, the bad and the ugly of alcohol as a source of escape. I wrote about it because I witnessed its use as a means of medicating - a lot of people using it to medicate themselves from hurt.
I was a bar-back, which is the person who cleans the bathrooms at the end of the night in the bar, and a cook. I had kind of given up. I was into backing other people up. Music was something I just did on the side and I don't think I had the energy to pimp myself out, like call people up and ask them to book me to play.
I like being out onstage in front of everybody, getting that energy and giving that energy. Hopefully I am making them forget about all their problems in the world. For however many hours they are at our show, hopefully they are going to have a great time, and it makes life a little more bearable for everybody involved.
The exciting part about sitting down and writing songs, playing shows, or being a musician in general is that you never know where those songs and that music is going to take you. There's such a cool feeling about that the phone could ring tomorrow and someone could say "he guess what? your song..." That really is cool.