Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist.
I'm often surprised by classical music and musicians. I've met a large number of them because my wife works for the Boston Symphony, and I'm in that world a lot now. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for people who are classically trained to read music or to memorize music, how difficult it is for them to improvise, to just go off and play. It's sort of, it's like terra incognita. They just, (makes noise) they don't get it.
You have to be careful when it comes to copyrights, whether just sounding like or feeling like something is enough to say you violated their copyrights because there's a lot of music out there, and there's a lot of things that feel like other things that are influenced by other things. And you don't want to get into that thing where all of us are suing each other all the time because this and that song feels like another song.
There's a lesson to be learned out of everything we go through in life. I recall when I left [Jack Gordon], and my mother was so upset. "How could you allow him to beat you? You should really be upset with him." And I said, "Mother, I can't be." She goes, "Why?" I said, "Because I can't harbor hatred in my heart." I was extremely religious and extremely naïve. God took me through that for a reason, for me to learn the outcome.
I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.
Hip hop music and soul music have been the two main motivators for me musically. The music I make is hip hop soul, but I do make r&b music as well. I don't think I make r&b music to the point where I'm accurately categorized. There's more to what I have to offer and offer in the future. People could choose to respect it or not, but I pray that you do. As long as you get it, support it, and pay for it, it doesn't really matter.
The Church of Christ, zealous and cautious guardian of the dogmas deposited with it, never changes any phase of them. It does not diminish them or add to them; it neither trims what seems necessary now grafts things superfluous . . . but it devotes all its diligence to one aim: To treat tradition faithfully and wisely; to consolidate and to strengthen what already was clear; and to guard what already was confirmed and defined.
I've always been willing to take challenges, I grew up taking challenges: being an only child, having a mother, no father, I've always been one who has always done things the way I thought they should be done and not, and not having to answer to anybody for it and I've always taken my own chances and I've always followed by instincts according, mother would follow, follow wit, instincts, wisdom, whatever, always followed that.
I've never done a video where I feel like the images have anything to do with my song, except in the most vague way possible, because I feel like the song is its own complete thing. But ideally, a song is a complete sphere like the Earth, where if you were an alien with a huge, huge finger, you could stick your finger into the middle of the ocean and make an impression on it. It’s not an impregnable sphere, but it is a sphere.
I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.
I encourage all of you to find strength within yourself, no matter what. Be proud of who you are and never let anyone or anything take that away from you. Inner Strength is something that we are all born with. However, I've learned that it requires patience and perseverance to fully achieve it. I promise you, though, that as long as you know in your heart who you are and what you want from this world, nothing is gonna stop you.
Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.
We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country. It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.
I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was...I've never had any discipline whatsoever. I just wait on a song like I was waiting for lightning to strike. And eventually-usually sometime around 3 in the morning-I'll have a good idea. By the time the sun comes up, hopefully, I'll have a decent song.
Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.
On the brilliance of James Brown's dancing − and the frustrations of bad camera-work on dancers:cers: I think James Brown is a genius you know when he's with the Famous Flames, unbelievable. I used to watch him on television and I used to get angry at the camera-man because whenever he would really start to dance they would be on a close-up so I couldn't see his feet. I'd shout "Show him! Show him!", so I could watch and learn.
GRINNING, DUCKING MY HEAD FOR BALANCE, I START TO SPIN WILDLY AS I CAN. THAT IS MY FAVORITE DANCE, BECAUSE IT CONTAINS A SECRET. THE FASTER I TWIRL, THE MORE I AM STILL INSIDE. MY DANCE IS ALL MOTION WITHOUT, ALL SILENCE WITHIN. AS MUCH AS I LOVE TO MAKE MUSIC, IT'S THE UNHEARD MUSIC THAT NEVER DIES. AND SILENCE IS MY REAL DANCE, THOUGH IT NEVER MOVES. IT STANDS ASIDE, MY CHOREOGRAPHER OF GRACE, AND BLESSES EACH FINGER AND TOE.
In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you.
The words to country songs are very earthy like the blues. They're not as dressed up and the people are very honest and say, 'Look, I miss you darlin', so I went out and got drunk in this bar.' That's the way you say it. Where in Tin Pan Alley they would say, 'Oh I missed you darling, so I went to this restaurant and I sat down and had a dinner for one.' That's cleaned up now, you see? But country and blues tells it like it is.
It's a cultural disability in America that we worship pleasure, leisure, and affluence. I think the church is doubly damned when they use Jesus as a vehicle for achieving all of that. Like, if you give a tithe, He'll make you rich. Why? Are you hacking Him off or something? If you give a tithe, you get rid of ten percent of the root of all evil. You should be giving ninety percent. Cause God can handle money better than we can.
Sometimes I'll hear some music in my head or I'll go to the piano and mess around and come up with a tune, or be on the guitar and come up with some chords - or I'll come up with lines, or just some words, or just a sentence. It could be the title of a song. I do that all the time. I write titles of songs a lot. And sometimes I'll end up writing a song that I don't have a title for and I'll say, "Oh, this goes with that title".
People used to ask me, 'What do you reckon you'll be doing when you're 40?', and I told 'em 'rocking out and kicking ass!' Now it's 'What do you reckon you'll be doing at 60?' and the answer's exactly the same. I'm always going to love Jimi Hendrix - 'Purple Haze' will still give me a hard-on when I'm hooked up to a life-support machine. Hey, even when I'm dead, they're going to have a hell of a job nailing the coffin lid down.
I've written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I'll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time, I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little - music changes into something else when you read it.
Someone has to really like you to go out there and physically get your CD. Shout out to everybody who actually paid for the CD. A lot of people don't realize that's how we live, that's our job. When we people take music from us, that's just like taking food off of our table and it's not cool. It's a lot of blood, sweat and tears that goes into the music and those lyrics. To have people just go and steal it, it doesn't feel well.
My dad isn't sure how I make a living because I'm not in the newspapers or on music shows any more. The world is bigger than England, however, but for the large part, yes, people don't know who I am. What are you gonna do? Unless you're a superstar act that attracts young people because it might be their last chance to see you before you die, then it's fairly typical. I'm astonished that I have any audience at all, to be honest.
Clean water is a necessity that we can no longer take for granted. Each year more people die of water related diseases than any other cause of death on this planet. With a higher rate of suffering and mortality than diabetes, cancer, high cholesterol, or war; or any two combined for that matter! An entire economy is growing around water. Those without money are suffering the most and risk severe illness from contaminated sources
I don't even think of myself as a quote, unquote star - that's really douchey. I think of myself as just like . . . a dance commander. You have to have dance parties all day and night, and you always have to be excited about having a dance party. You have to have a dance party in Milan one day, and then wake up and have a dance party at, like, four in the morning on national television in L.A. the next day. The hours are insane.
Anybody who tells you that being married and having kids is a walk in the park - it's a beautiful thing. It's the best thing I've ever done in my life - but it's definitely work. You have to work at it like you do anything else you care about in life. It takes commitment and it takes work, and that's all part of it, but in the end there's nothing more worthwhile than working on your family. It's just the best thing in the world.
I feel different. You know this many times over, because you are a parent, but it transforms you. It's this incredible experience where, in one way, you are still very much yourself, and in some ways you become even more connected to the rest of yourself. All of a sudden, you just get more connected to your child self, and your teenage self, and all these selves that you've maybe been abandoning at every date post that you pass.
In the beginning I remember when I would spend three hours a day on MySpace just trying to comment everyone back, and now, I spend a half hour a night on MySpace just putting up new stuff and answering people back and monitoring all the fan sites, and saying hi and thank you. I'm still way on top of it. I haven't grown out of it because it'll always be something that helped launch my career, and I'm going to keep maintaining it.
Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.
What is dangerous about the far right is not that it takes religion seriously - most of us do - but rather that it condemns all other spiritual choices - the Buddhist, the Jew, the Muslim, and many others who consider themselves to be good Christians. The wall of separation between church and state is needed precisely because religion, like art, is too important a part of the human experience to be choked by the hands of censors.
There's enough ugliness - you know, we got wars going on and people dying and sickness and everything. We don't need to have our art be ugly. But it is, in a lot of it. And these people justify this crap by saying, "Oh we're just representing what's out there, man". Basically, you're making it worse and number one, the artist's job is to elevate people and to lift people up and to give them a place to go, something to hold on to.
Performing onstage is all about reacting in a grand way. You're playing an arena of seventeen or eighteen thousand people and it's your job to make sure the person at the back feels as cool as the person all the way in the front. Being on stage is a bit of a façade. You get to walk out there and be the coolest version of yourself that you could possibly have imagined and then you come off stage and you're just like everyone else.
For a long time I thought-'I've got to buck up and be strong. I've got to put on a brave face-and get through this near burn-out or that discouraging time in my life,'" "God has really seriously changed my thinking on this. When you take off the mask, you relate at a base level to everyone else who has been through pain-and everyone has. Honesty promotes intimacy and promotes us together relying on God. True honesty is beautiful.
I think the music industry, for instance, is such a huge, multibazillion-dollar industry and it's become very, very savvy. There's a very short grace period in which actual human rebellion or resistance can thrive before it's co-opted by these huge companies. And all of youth culture is packaged and sold back to us at this furious rate these days. I think it's part and parcel to this corporate encroachment on our lives in general.
I really lucked out with that song ["As Cool As I Am"]. Men were becoming much more comfortable with all the different facets and parts of their identity, including their gentler, funnier, sillier, nurturing parts. They started showing up. There was so much exploration of gender at that time. Women were showing up with the range of ways of being female in the world and men were showing up with the range of being male in the world.
I am making an effort to truly live. I don't mean to imply by that that I haven't been alive before but, with my son being here and such a powerful force in my life, he's given me a freedom to be more. I think that sometimes we can get stuck, and just the fact that he's here says so much to me about my own existence. I didn't think I'd be able to have children, and this level of blessing is something I can't even put my finger on.
Except for a couple of hours in the morning which I passed in the company of a sage I stayed in bed without food only a few mouthfuls of water “you are a fine looking old man” I said to myself in the mirror “and what is more you have the correct attitude You don’t care if it ends or if it goes on And as for the women and the music there will be plenty of that in Paradise” Then I went to the Mosque of Memory to express my gratitude
We do not worship the Prophet. We worship God our Eternal Father and the risen Lord Jesus Christ. But we acknowledge the Prophet; we proclaim him; we respect him; we reverence him as an instrument in the hands of the Almighty in restoring to the earth the ancient truths of the divine gospel, together with the priesthood through which the authority of God is exercised in the affairs of His Church and for the blessing of His people.
I think hemp is one of the greatest plants that God put in the ground, and I don't think anybody has the right to eradicate it. Just because somebody wants to get high with a joint, that's no reason to throw him in jail and take his damn belongings. He's just trying to get well. The mother - 's sick. That's why people drink beer when they come home from work. They're stressed out. That's all grass does. It's a big stress reliever.
The world is filled with people who are no longer needed. And who try to make slaves of all of us. And they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare. And without their music and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with - - and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never know its speed, its power.
I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I'm done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what's really going on here. That usually softens things.
I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification. And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
[As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian.
Think of hope the minute you feel miserable with your life. Take up the habit of finding joy in the smallest of things in life. The misery you feel now will be a strong foundation for your future and you will become someone with an invaluable life. Also, hold the hand of the person next to you. Don’t think that you’re the only one living in this world. Don’t grow your sorrow on your own and ask for help from the person next to you.
The point of life that I'm currently at is a 'me right now' type of attitude. I am 37 years-old, my son is in college and my daughter is in high school. I'm becoming okay with me. I can't live life as an artist or person being someone that someone else has tried to mold me into. I'm not going to put on a dress that's two sizes too small. I'm custom making my own clothes so that they'll never fit anyone else if you know what I mean.
It's coming to America first, The cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range And the machinery for change And it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken And it's here the lonely say That the heart has got to open In a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. O mighty Ship of State! To the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed Through the Squalls of Hate Sail on, sail on.
Most incredible, however, are the times we know Christ is with us in the midst of our daily, routine lives. In the middle of cleaning the house or driving somewhere in the pick-up, He stops us. . . in our tracks and makes His presence known. Often it's in the middle of the most mundane task that He lets us know He is there with us. We realize, then, that there can be no "ordinary" moments for people who live their lives with Jesus.
When I first came on the scene, I don't think people knew what to make of the way I dress, my aesthetic and how that ties into my music. It took a lot of explaining. You don't really see females in country music dressed in all black wearing funeral garb with netting on their face. I have a bit of a gothic sense to me in a lot of ways, with a bit of outlaw country, rockabilly and blues. My subject matter is off the cuff a little bit.