Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My father has a beautiful, beautiful voice. His father was a pastor of a church. He sang in church. My mother sang in a church choir. I can take no credit for my vocal talent, because, both my father, and mother have beautiful, beautiful voices.
I look at the careers of people I'm standing on the shoulders of. People like Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaughan. These are icons I wanted to emulate, and I feel like they've been holding me up for quite a long time.
I think it's fun to look at people with big diamonds. I see them in my audience all the time, with the fur coat, a woman whose hand is always out front, or the two fingers are on the cheek to show her diamond. I don't have anything against that.
The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too - eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko's, Fatburger, Subway - I was a sandwich artist - and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.
I had been an activist on the issue of HIV, primarily in the African American and Latino communities here in the U.S. for many years. It was horrifying to me how the pandemic was raging right here in this country but no one was talking about it.
I don't think soldiers should be anywhere in the world. I mean, that is a moral and a basic philosophy. I think that the only way to end wars is to have no military and to find other ways in which - I think we should suspend all nuclear weapons.
Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.
I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.
I often use music as a handle for very emotionally explosive substances: love, sex, God, fear, doubt, politics, the economics of the soul - these are daunting thoughts in the back of my mind that I rarely visit without the safety gloves of song.
So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.
I'd got married and wanted to have kids, so had kids, brought them up, did other things, and slowly got back into music. And it feels great, having one foot in the present, writing and covering interesting songs, and having one foot in the past.
The idea behind the Anti Tour was people asking me how I would top the 'Aphrodite' tour... I thought the best option was to go completely the other way. I always tried to be that way - sometimes it works and sometimes you fall flat on your face.
Funnily enough, when I was leaving school and they asked you what you were going to do, and I just liked acting, that's never what I would say. I would always say I would go into business, even though I didn't really know what was meant by that.
It's hard to put yourself in front of a camera, in front of the world, when you don't feel like you look the part. I've always had that problem. But I deal with it every day. When I'm interviewing, I'm like, "How do I look? Do I look all right?"
I'm great at working with people and collaborating. And if my biggest gift of all is that I'm really good at pulling things from people and helping them become better at what they're doing, I'm here, as I believe all of us are, to be of service.
In the 70s, GEORGE CLINTON and PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC and EARTH WIND & FIRE, we were very serious about our music and who we were trying to touch. I think that's why the music of the 70s has not died - because it has a rejuvenating quality to it.
I just didn't like the word 'gay.' I still don't like it. It's a dumb way of describing sexuality. I like 'queer' or other words, but 'gay' is a word that had a completely different-meaning word and has been reappropriated. I just don't like it.
Between 1958 and 1963, I sold about 40 million records - to the shock of my mother and father because I was always playing Beethoven. But I bought my mother a mink stole. She was very happy, and she said, 'I think this is better than Beethoven.'
Anything human can be felt through music, which means that there is no limit to the creating that can be done with music. You can take the same phrase from any song and cut it up so many different ways - it's infinite. It's like God... you know?
And now the end is near And so I face the final curtain, My friends, I'll say it clear, I'll state my case of which I'm certain. I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
I'm not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads.
Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular."
Outside of being a hit maker, I want to also be a star maker. Me being so young still as a veteran in the game, I wanted to give back to the youth and give back to my community. I want to find somebody that's special and birth them to the world.
I would never have been discovered without the X Factor. I was just doing the working men's clubs and I loved doing that. That was the life for me at that time. I never expected to be noticed doing that, that's why I went for X Factor by myself.
Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.
When I get home I'll still have to unload the dishwasher and clean my room. Last night my mom got so fed up of my messy floor in my room she picked it all up off the floor and put it on my bed so I would have to clean it up before I went to bed!
There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don't think this trend will define studios permanently.
Well, the problem I've had with all the interviews I've had in America - I had meetings with about nine labels - and they all say to me "Will your new songs fit in with what is popular and what is in the chart?" And I say "Good God, I hope not!"
I know what I'm the best at. But I still want to do something different because it's fun for me. Even though I'm really good at something, it's boring for me to do the same thing every time and it'll be boring for people who are listening to me.
Country music fans are the best everywhere and they've always made me feel like I'm at home, no matter what zip code I'm in. I just want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for blessing me with such an incredible career that I truly enjoy.
Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.
I would love to see more dialogue around the "responsibilities" of art consumers - how can audiences better financially support artists we love, artists who are doing the work, so that artists have a more solid foundation upon which to make art?
I never really got paid for 'Tell It Like Is,' but I look back at it and say God knew what he was doing; he probably figured that if I had got money back in them days, I wouldn't be here now. That's okay. I'm here. And I'm still singing the song.
I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn't intervened, I'd still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.
I'm a little bit nervous for us with all of this electronically generated new hyper-space that we've moved into, where not only people but also economies and systems, like banking, are left to zeros and ones. I want to be more than a zero or one.
I have different methods. Sometimes I just like to immerse myself in music; that's a really good way to switch off from the world. I also like to listen to Eckhart Tolle, a very wise, very spiritual man, who teaches us how to live in the present.
You know, frankly, it's like I sort of realized something about life in the past six or eight months - that taking things a day at a time is a blessing and it's an honor and it's something that makes the day that you're living a lot more valuable
I don't care what your politics are, but I do suggest you pay attention to the next election and go out and vote. It doesn't matter; you can believe whatever you want to believe, but this is the time everybody should be paying a lot of attention.
'Rocking With Leroy' used to come on when I would come in from school. It was a very, very big R&B broadcast of the day when I was a young girl. And I would come in and put my books down, lie down on the floor, and listen to 'Rocking With Leroy.'
I've had to ban my mum from coming to see me play. She gets so nervous before any show. I've always got a few nerves but she's so much worse than me. You'd think she'd be able to handle that kind of situation. After all, she is a concert pianist.
God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.
I don't think it will ever be lessened. Because I always move on to something else - and the music that I listen to, that I ingest, is a lot different than what I put out. I'm always becoming obsessed with the next phase of my musical vocabulary.
A song like "Walkabout", it's totally imitative. The goal of that song was to make people happy, and I've never really made a song to make people happy before. I really genuinely wanted people to listen to that song and have their spirits lifted.
I used to say that I was making "country music," because it was the quickest, easiest answer. I'm obviously heavily influenced by country music. There was a three-year stint in my life where I listened to nothing else, so, I learned it very well.
I want to have a record with Beyonce or Lady Gaga. They are both my inspirations. Especially Beyonce. She's like number 1 right now because I love everything about her. Her fashion, her style, her attitude when it comes to singing. She's perfect.
There is no truth to the rumors that we hate each other. I have no ill feeling for [Britney Spears] and vice versa. I am proud of all the achievements she has made in her career, she is a very hard-working person. I have nothing but love for her.
I'm an artist, and expressing myself in a sexual way, no matter how that changes throughout the years, is something that has always come naturally to me. At this point of my life, I'm 32 and I feel sexier than ever because you know what you want.
Thanks for the joy that you're givin' me I want you to know I believe in your song Rhythm and rhyme and harmony You help me along, makin' me strong, Give me the beat boys and free my soul I wanna get lost in your rock n' roll And drift away . . .
A lot can be said with just a look, or the way the body moves. Each song is a different character. So each song takes on a different movement of the body. And the body has to go with the subject and the attitude that you have toward that subject.
I just want to be worthy. I just want to be able to make people understand that okay, Eddie is still good at what he does, so we can now go and buy that ticket [to his concert], and I can feel like they bought it and they got their money's worth.