Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I know I'm a very dynamic performer. Once you come to the show, you're gonna want to have the album. I think it's more about showing people that it's OK to share similarities, but it's more important to embrace your individuality.
It's gotta be fun, if it's not fun it's not worth doing. Music is about having a good time feeling your soul, whether it makes you laugh or it makes you cry, just so long as you feel as much as you can. That's the mission of Pono.
I always want to have time to experiment, and have transitional things, and have these weird non-songs, but usually the stuff I'm working on comes down to this weird deadline, where it just never happens, and it's kind of a bummer.
Joy' to me is a reflection of the life experiences that I've had throughout the first record and kind of having some time and a hiatus. It's just like all of those experiences that I had during that period - that growing up period.
It's good to listen to lots of different stuff, just whatever you like. The first two records I ever bought were Alice Cooper, Killer and Jethro Tull, Aqualung. That's two weird records to begin with, but I think they hold up well.
I'm on this eternal quest to get the best guitar sound in the world, but my vision of what is 'the best' changes every time I go into the studio. Sometimes my goal is to make my guitar jump out, and sometimes I want it to lay back.
So few hip-hop artists have ever advanced. Their songs on their seventh, eighth albums sound exactly like the songs on their first album. More than an artist, I'm a real person-and real people grow. And I wanna just sing my growth.
I think the whole thing, boy band, it's a little bit of a dirty word. They say it's not a good thing to be in a boy band. We want to change that. We want to make the boy band cool. It's not just about dancing and dressing the same.
I'd say, for my freshman year in college, I was doing everything in my power to hide the fact that I had ever had any association with the Paul Green School of Rock Music because it was like this bruise. It was such a sore subject.
Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry. You said, "I love you like the stars above, I'll love you 'til I die". There's a place for us, you know the movie song. When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.
I think summer, at least as I've experienced it, can be joyous but it can also be tough emotionally. Physically, it can be hot to the point of being unbearable and I think you want to capture that frustration, but also the release.
Its build quality is superb, given that I am a novice to it 6 months ago and being heavy handed it stands up very well. I have trouble thinking of something I enjoy more than setting off and popping the kite and screaming downwind!
Sometimes a loss that just comes out of left field rings in a very weird way when you have actually sort of relied on this small moment with this or that person, as a moment that actually has defined something for you in your life.
One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.
'Joy' to me is a reflection of the life experiences that I've had throughout the first record and kind of having some time and a hiatus. It's just like all of those experiences that I had during that period - that growing up period.
I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God's eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.
I run about four days per week and do some sort of hike or yoga/stretching on the other three. Kind of self-propelling my body and muscles forward in my own controlled chaos helps me find the ground a little bit easier on the daily.
I don't know if I have good habits, but I'm very devoted to writing. I'm very compulsive about having a project, at least one, and trying to follow the business as much as I can. I keep on top of all the entertainment business news.
The idea of it was I was thinking about how when you're a kid you get this unconditional love and you spend the rest of your life trying to find that, but you can't because everyone's in it for their own thing. It's kind of cynical.
It's really easy to not be satisfied with your work, or people, or anything, but I really embrace the idea of not having to want [anything]. Not because you're denying yourself anything, but because it [everything] is already there.
I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.
Let the power come. Let ecstasy erupt. Allow your heart to expand and overflow with adoration for this magnificent creation and for the love, wisdom and power that birthed it all. Rapture is needed now - rapture, reverence and grace.
I started designing and getting into cutting and sewing, I also started learning how to do patterns and tech packs. From there I transitioned from challenging myself to make T-shirts to starting to make custom pieces for celebrities.
Luckily, like for instance the song "Suicide Dream 1," I wrote it out of such an incredibly powerful state that the melody carries that affect. So when I produce that affect, that melody, with my body, I'm immediately thrown into it.
Just be open, life is about a constant journey and I'm very spiritual, but I'm also in touch with what's going on around me and who I am, and you have to know yourself. So for me, that's what keeps me going is just being interactive.
I even played bass for a while. Besides playing electric guitar, I'd also get asked to play some acoustic stuff. But, since I didn't have an acoustic guitar at the time, I used to borrow one from a friend so I could play folk joints.
There have been many times when I've been asked to appear and I'd say to myself, what am I going to talk about? Early on, when I did interviews, I'd tell everyone, Don't ask me about dates. I don't even remember what I did yesterday.
I'm really bad with answering questions. Usually, I don't even answer them. I try to find inspiration inside of the question. I think, and I jump from one beam of inspiration or energy to the next, as opposed to explaining the energy.
When an old tape machine makes pitch wobble, some people would say that compromises fidelity and would try to get rid of it. But to me that wobble adds richness, it instantly brings back the feelings you associate with old recordings.
When I've produced a song, I try to record a vocal over it, and sometimes it becomes really hard. Sometimes I've already said a lot that I want to say within the production. The vocal is just adding to it, rather than it being a song.
If you were a performer that only had an acoustic instrument, back in the day you couldn't hide behind your guitar pedals or the production or the vibe. There was performance and then there was the song, and that was all that you had.
Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.
I was wanting to do an album but I didn't know if I was really ready. Jerry Wexler was one of my closest friends and allies, like my godfather. He said, "Let's do an album." I couldn't sing worth a damn, but there were some good songs.
I don't think I set out to have a career in female groups, but it's just kind of happened, and by nature of having worked with my sister - growing up with a sister who also plays, and being in communication with other female musicians.
Just the actual physics of putting it all together, you know, the latter period is actually quite fragmented in terms of the licenses and all those things so it makes a compilation of the full twenty years really a technical minefield.
Having a Rolex or a Benz is not something that actually represents your success because there’s always something more expensive to buy. Success is really being able to do things for others as well as the people around you and yourself.
Anytime I've had a big thing that's ever pierced and cut across the Internet, it was a fight for justice. Justice. And when you say justice, it doesn't have to be war. Justice could just be clearing a path for people to dream properly.
I think about things to put them in a place where I don't have to think about them anymore. Say if I had a child with a really bad mom, I would have to think more than if I had a child with a good mom. I'm just doing my homework early.
Whether I do jazz or R&B, there are always complaints. I would just listen to the complaints about what I do instead of celebrating what I do, and that I'm different and in my own lane. It took a while for me to just ignore the doubts.
There happened to be guitar classes at the college, and there was a guitar teacher there with whom I used to play. In addition, I also would go out into country schools and teach little kids basic guitar and singing a few times a week.
All I'm doing is writing it down and putting it in a cadence. Once I get into a cadence, then why should I even stop and wonder what it is? You can do that for the rest of your life, but when it's coming out, you don't want to stop it.
I thought it would be really cool to show the world the inner life of someone like me, who doesn't have a huge personality, who deals with some personal demons and is a little bit shy and a little awkward when you first get to know me.
I was never a kid who dreamt of being a performer. I started singing the songs because nobody knew who I was or cared at all. If I wasn't going to sing them, nobody was going to sing them, so I had to step in and fill that role myself.
When you meet someone, a friend, who's living out on the road, or living semi-homeless, or leading their life in a radically different way, it makes you think about your own life in a really critical way and feel completely disoriented.
I fervently believe that, as someone has said before, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." I want to help change the way young people look at school, and hence, the way they look at their futures.
I was on the junior team when I was a freshman, that’s how good I was. But I wasn’t on my eighth-grade team, because some coach - some Grammy, some reviewer, some fashion person, some blah blah blah - they’re all the same as that coach.
Somebody who knows all about how to make the record, or how to make records, they know how to work the EQ and they know how to work the stuff, but they don't know what I want it to sound like. So it's just easier for me to do it myself.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.
Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before. And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.